Revealed: how a crafty Labor move on the NBN is being used to win over voters

It seemed like an innocuous amendment to an obscure piece of legislation.

Now, a week out from polling day, a Labor source has revealed for the first time the lengths the party went to in order to develop its National Broadband Network policy.

When it comes to the NBN, data is always key.

Labor wanted to know, once the network rollout was completed in 2020, what improvements could be made. Specifically, the opposition was keen to upgrade as many homes as possible from fibre-to-the-node (FttN) to fibre-to-the-home (FttH) as cost-effectively as possible.

This takes us back to May 2020, when the government was rushing to pass legislation that would tax fixed-line networks to help pay for NBN regional networks.

One of the amendments added in the Senate required NBN Co to provide mapping data about every NBN-serving area module within 150 days. The data would show the dominant technology type used and the date people could order a connection in that area.

The data allowed Labor to do a spatial density analysis of homes within fibre-to-the-node areas and determine where it was most cost-effective to upgrade the connections.

The Coalition had promised to add 2m premises at a cost of $2.9bn. But Labor was able to determine an additional 1.5m homes could be upgraded for a further $2.4bn.

The data means Labor, during the campaign, could provide precise local upgrade numbers to its candidates on the hustings.

The shadow communications minister, Michelle Rowland, has posted on her Facebook page that 106,000 homes in western Sydney will be upgraded to full fibre under the plan, including 15,000 in her electorate of Greenway, for example.