Australia has a new acting communications minister after Malcolm Turnbull stepped down on Monday and successfully ousted Tony Abbott as leader of the reigning Liberal Party.
According to a report by The Mandarin on Monday, Paul Fletcher, secretary to the minister for communications, will take Turnbull’s place on an interim basis until a permanent replacement is found.
As far as the telecoms industry is concerned, Turnbull will be remembered for scaling back the previous government’s A$43 billion (€30.3 billion) plan to deploy a nationwide fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network.
As shadow communications and broadband minister, Turnbull devoted plenty of time to castigating then Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and comms minister Stephen Conroy’s plan to create a new state-owned monopoly wholesale provider by acquiring and replacing incumbent Telstra’s copper network for A$11 billion.
Onc e in government, Turnbull acted quickly to slash the costs of what we now know as NBN by adopting a multi-technology mix led by fibre-to-the-node (FTTN). NBN subsequently struck a new deal with Telstra that allowed it to use the telco’s legacy infrastructure in its nationwide network.
Despite efforts to lower costs, it emerged in August that the total funding required to build the network will come in at A$46 billion-A$56 billion, compared to a previous target of around A$41 billion.
Turnbull insisted at the time that the increased figure was a more accurate reflection of the true cost of the network build, rather than a result of ballooning costs.
Spoken like a true politician…
