Australia’s shadow minister for communications and broadband, Malcolm Turnbull, has said that he remains confident of making alterations to the deal that the Labor government made with Telstra relating to the latter’s participation in the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN), should the Coalition triumph in parliamentary elections due in September 2014.
Telstra CEO David Thodey was cited by The Australian earlier this week as saying that he would still seek the AUD11 billion (USD11.25 billion) previously agreed for providing access to its pits and ducts, and for transferring customers from its current copper infrastructure to the NBN. In speaking to a local radio station however, Mr Turnbull said he expected the fixed line incumbent to be flexible to changes to the deal, even if the financial aspects are not revised. Commenting on the matter, the shadow minister noted: ‘In other words they’re not going to renegotiate a contract which results in their shareholders getting a haircut obviously… But we can change for example what we can do, we can use their copper, we can do fibre-to-the-node rather than fibre-to-the-premise as long as Telstra shareholders are not worse off financially and that is very manageable.’