COMMUNICATIONS Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been urged to end his silence on Tasmania's NBN roll-out, with doubt pervading the future of the stalled scheme.
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With contracting work seemingly halted in the state's South and crawling along in the North, Andrew Connor, spokesman for consumer group Digital Tasmania, said the delay was causing anxiety.
``Mr Turnbull was as clear as day in promising the full roll-out in Tasmania and if he's going to roll that back, he's deceived Tasmanians,'' Mr Connor said.
Mr Connor said the lack of reliable services necessitated a network upgrade and was critical of the previous government for delays in the roll-out.
``It's really pot luck if you get decent broadband in Tassie . . . and with mobile broadband, 3G or 4G, at night it just gets swamped by people getting home from work, from school jumping on the service.''
Mr Turnbull said before the election he would honour all existing contracts in Tasmania, but his office declined to answer questions again yesterday.
The Liberal Party risks repeating a mistake highlighted in the Peter Reith report into the 2010 election, when the party recorded its worst two-party preferred vote since 1949.
Mr Reith, a former defence minister, scolded the party's NBN policy, saying it was written ``without a set of Tasmanian eyes about it''.
``The party needs to make a clear and unambiguous statement about its intentions on broadband infrastructure in Tasmania in the future'' it said, attributing a loss in Bass partly to the NBN issue.
Fast forward to the present and Bass Liberal MHR Andrew Nikolic said the party was still picking up the pieces from the previous government.
``The Labor Party has left a huge mess, with no work for months in Tasmania. We're still trying to get to the bottom of it,'' Mr Nikolic said.
bmckay@examiner.com.au; Twitter: @benmackey