Melbourne raids follow a long list of NBN leaks and political gamesmanship

COMMUNICATIONS Minister Mitch Fifield confirmed he knew NBN Co had enlisted the AFP over the leaked documents.

Australian Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Australian shadow communications minister Jason Clare speak to the media last night. Picture: Lukas Coch

COMMUNICATIONS Minister Mitch Fifield has revealed he knew NBN Co had referred the matter of the leaked documents to the AFP.

Senator Fifield said he had been advised on the matter but had not shared the information with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull or any other government ministers.

EARLIER: Uproar over the AFP raids on Labor figures is growing after it was revealed an NBN employee was with police and took photos he sent to his company.

Labor fears the 32 photos it thought had been deleted from a mobile phone are now in the hands of the company.

Lawyers for the ALP are demanding the Federal Police explain why the photos were disseminated, and to be given a list of the documents copied in them.

Labor fears confidential election material and protected papers used in Senate inquiries could be among the documents.

It was revealed that an NBN Co employee named Steere accompanied Australian Federal Police Thursday night when they raided the Melbourne electorate office of Opposition front bencher Stephen Conroy, and the home of Andy Byrne.

Mr Byrne was an adviser to Senator Conroy when he was Communications Minister and now works with Shadow Communications Minister Jason Clare.

The extraordinary execution of AFP search warrants during the election campaign was aimed at finding leaked confidential NBN documents after the company demanded an investigation in December.

The documents have appeared in newspaper reports and detail big delays in NBN’s broadband rollout and rising costs, which have been linked to the policies of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull when he was Communications Minister.

Mr Steere was there to identify documents related to the search, but he also took photographs on his mobile phone.

The lawyer’s letter sent by Paul Galbally tonight to AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin said Mr Steere had “disseminated images of documents obtained in the execution of the warrant to NBN Co Ltd”.

Claims of parliamentary privilege had been made on the documents, meaning NBN could be breaking the law by keeping them.

The letter asked why Mr Steere disseminated the photos when AFP officers present had acknowledged they were privileged.

It also asked, “Under whose authority did he take such action?”.

The complaint followed a meeting this afternoon between lawyers and the AFP at which it was agreed Mr Seere’s photos would be downloaded and passed on to the Clerk of the Senate, and then deleted.

Malcolm Turnbull has said the AFP raids have nothing to do with him and his party. Picture: Lukas Coch/AAP

WHAT THE AFP RAIDS ARE ALL ABOUT

Few issues in Australian politics have proved so contentious and divisive as the building of the national broadband network.

A difference in approach by the major parties on the technology that should be used to build the national infrastructure has been at the heart of a bitter political fight which last night culminated in federal police carrying out raids on two properties in Melbourne.

So what exactly were the raids all about?

The raids were carried out in relation to leaked confidential NBN documents that revealed cost blowouts in building the network and showed parts of the project were behind schedule.

There were leaks from the NBN prior to the 2013 election when Labor was in charge, but they have ramped up dramatically in the past six months.

A DIFFERENCE IN POLICY

Following the Coalition’s 2013 election win, the new government ordered the NBN to abandon a fibre to the premises (FTTP) rollout for a cheaper “multi technology mix” that predominantly relied on the pre-existing copper and Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) networks owned by Telstra and Optus to make the final connection to the home.

The fibre to the node (FTTN) model which has become the cornerstone of the Coalition’s NBN policy has been criticised by its detractors who believe the speeds it offers, which max out at 100 mbps, will be obsolete in the future.

Labor’s initial proposal was costed at $45 billion to be completed in 2021, providing speeds of up to one gigabyte per second. However that $45 billion figure was expected to dramatically blowout, as was the completion date.

Turnbull’s plan, however, was initially set to cost $29.5 billion and be completed in 2019, which was later adjusted to 2020.

Despite cost blowouts after the election that have taken the NBN cost to $56 billion, “cheaper and sooner” was the Coalition’s message. But it’s been a message that has been continually undermined by a number of recent leaks of confidential NBN documents to the media.

THE LEAKS

In November documents from NBN were leaked to Fairfax Media which revealed that the Optus cable TV and broadband network that NBN co. had purchased for $800 million were in such bad shape the company was considering replacing the network entirely.

The move was set to cause a cost blowout of up to $375 million and push back connection to more than half a million homes.

“This is more evidence of the absolute mess that Malcolm Turnbull has created with his second-rate NBN,” Labor communications spokesman Jason Clare said at the time.

The following month, The Australian reported it had obtained internal documents showing the cost of repairing the copper network bought from Telstra would amount to $640 million, which represented a tenfold blowout from initial estimates.

In February Fairfax Media published a confidential document showing the project was facing mounting delays and rising costs. The report revealed that NBN co. had only achieved one third of the “construction completions” which it had targeted at the time.

In March, internal NBN documents made their way to the media that detailed NBN trials of fibre to the distribution point technology (FTTdP) which caused some to accuse the government of blocking a switch to a superior and cost-comparable technology.

In April, further leaked documents were obtained by The Australian Financial Review, which showed certain parts of the rollout had missed connection targets by up to 87 days.

One of the documents, dated in March, was a monthly “ready for service” update the company provides to ISPs so they know when they can begin offering NBN services in certain parts of the country. It showed the first 40 FTTN areas to be built by the NBN without Telstra were delayed.

These leaks were among others to surface in recent months.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow speaks to the media.

THE POLICE INVESTIGATION

NBN CEO Bill Morrow had previously warned staff that the leaks could be illegal. According to reports, the NBN had requested an AFP investigation as far back as December.

Thursday night police raided the Treasury Place office of former communications minister Stephen Conroy and the Brunswick home of a Labor staffer Andy Byrne, who works for opposition communications spokesman Jason Clare.

“The Australian Federal Police can confirm that it executed two search warrants in Melbourne yesterday evening as part of an investigation concerning allegations of the unauthorised disclosure of Commonwealth information,” the AFP said in a statement posted on its website this morning.

“These allegations were the subject of a referral from the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co), received by the AFP on 9 December 2015,” the statement reads.

“This investigation has been ongoing since that date. This investigation has been undertaken independent of government, and decisions regarding yesterday’s activity were made by the AFP alone.”

Stopping short of saying the AFP were acting at the behest of the government, shadow attorney general Mark Dreyfus told Lateline the raids were “extraordinary and unprecedented events.”

Today Bill Shorten hit out at the government accusing them of enforcing secrecy over the tax payer funded project.

“Malcolm Turnbull’s been in charge of the largest infrastructure project in Australia’s history, and it’s a disaster, in 2013 he promised before the election it would cost $29 billion, it’s now $56 billion. I think Australians have a right to know this,” Shorten said.

“We need to ask ourselves this question: Is Australia a better country or a worse country because we’ve seen the extent of the incompetence and the ineptitude and the addiction to secrecy of the Turnbull government?”

“Why is it that this government doesn’t want Australians to know information about the cost blowouts of the NBN,” he said.

Australian police confirmed they were assisted by NBN staff to carry out the raids.

“The AFP has received assistance from the NBN Co in this investigation, which included facilitating interviews with a number of NBN Co employees as part of yesterday’s activity,” the police statement said.

On Friday evening, the NBN agreed “under duress” to destroy photos of documents taken by one of its employees during the raids, after the AFP acknowledged this should not have happened, the ABC reported.