Nick Minchin, Shadow Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has told Tech Wired that he remains defensive of the Governments 42 billion dollar National Broadband Network after Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, addressed the Nation on Tuesday last week at the National Press Club.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Tuesday last week, Senator Stephen Conroy said that the opposition had failed to invest in Nation-building broadband infrastructure.

“We should not be surprised that the Opposition fails to grasp the importance of this nation-building initiative,” said Senator Stephen Conroy.

“After all, they failed to undertake critical infrastructure investment for 12 long years,” he said.

Speaking with a spokesperson for the Shadow Minister, Tech Wired was told that this was absolute nonsense.

“He (Senator Stephen Conroy) has promised us the world, but delivered very little,” the spokesperson said.

When asked if Opposition believed that Senator Conroy was copying them with the offering of wireless services for the 10 percent not included in the FTTP (Fibre to the Premise) build, they agreed.

“We took to the election to deliver wireless services for the last-mile,”

“Conroy is now building a model very similar to that of our, now scrapped, OPEL plan.”

Responding to Senator Conroy’s latest announcment of “fast-tracking” backhaul around Australia, Tech Wired was told by the Shadow Minister’s spokesperson that under their scrapped OPEL plan they would’ve rolled out a large amount of backhaul.

“Under our OPEL plan 15,000 kilometres of new back haul was going to be rolled out,” the spokesperson said.

The Shadow Minister himself, Senator Nick Minchin, told Tech Wired in a brief phone interview that he remained sceptical as to why the Government won’t release their report conducted by the expert panel as to why the Government brought forward the decision to build a FTTP network.

When informed about Tech Wired’s failed attempt at retrieving the NBN expert panel report under FOI (Freedom of Information) laws before the NBN announcement, Minchin said that he knew about it and was currently looking at possible ways to retrieve the report now that the announcement is complete and the Government continues to refuse access to it.

“We’re having a look at it,” Nick Minchin told Tech Wired.

“We’ll be looking at all the opportunities available in the Senate to get those reports,” he said.

“It’s pretty outrageous to abandon its (the Government’s) first policy and expect the Parliament to support it without any evidence,” he added.

His spokesperson told us that they believed the government was hiding something.

“The assumption we would make is that there is something to hide,” the spokesperson said.

The Government released all but a summary from the expert panel report, which we known consists of 913 pages thanks to the FOI application.

“They only released a 3 page extract that tells us bugger all,” Minchin responded in our phone interview.

When asked if the Opposition would accept the Government’s report if commercial interests were redacted, they said yes.

“If there is some particular part that needs to be blacked out, we don’t mind,” the spokesperson said.

The Opposition is also asking the Government to release coverage maps of where the FTTP network will be rolled out.

“We’ve called on them (the Government) to release coverage maps as we’re getting a lot of angst from rural Australia that they’re going to miss out,” the spokesperson for Minchin said.

Responding to Tech Wired’s request for comment, the Department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy issued the following statement:

The Government has released the observations of the expert panel in an extract from the evaluation report.

The remainder of the expert panel’s report contains confidential commercial information so will not be released.

The ACCC report also contains confidential information.

The Minister has asked the Department to ascertain whether or not there may be aspects of the ACCC report suitable for release.