Malcolm Turnbull has not delivered Australia a “future-proof” National Broadband Network, but he has turned himself into an NBN-proof prime minister. He knows he can get away with breezily misleading statements, because the whole story is too complicated for the parliament, the media and the general public to get across.

Like the one you’ve heard over and over, from Turnbull or Communications Minister Mitch Fifield, about how Labor’s NBN would’ve “cost $30 billion more and taken up to eight years longer”. Simply untrue. Those numbers were based on an assessment of how much it would cost to abandon Labor’s fibre-to-the-premise model in 2013, switch over to Turnbull’s mixed-technology model for a couple of years, and then change course again and go back to Labor’s model. NBN Co chief Bill Morrow confirmed in 2015 that the “extra $30 billion” figure was not an estimate of the total cost of rolling out of Labor’s NBN, had they not been interrupted by the election of the Coalition government: “We’ve done no analysis to say … what if the 2013 election … had a different result on it to see, therefore, what were the peak funding costs? We’ve not yet analysed that.”

Or the one Turnbull repeated this week, about how the NBN has done more connections this month, than in the first six years of the NBN.

So what? The NBN had a complicated agreement with Telstra to negotiate – and Turnbull soon found out that can take longer than you expect, when he had to renegotiate it himself – and it also had to start from scratch, for example, building the transit network backbone of the NBN first.

The biggest lie of all is to pretend that the cost of rolling out fibre to the premises would not have fallen – dramatically – over time, as it did in New Zealand. New Zealand, free of the Murdoch press, has managed to make sensible decisions about broadband, and is now light-years ahead of us, as ABC’s Four Corners demonstrated last year. Meanwhile, the cost of upgrading legacy copper and HFC networks has continued to rise, and the timeframe in which they will need to be upgraded again has continued to shorten as demand for bandwidth grows exponentially, as it was always expected to do. The NBN says demand for bandwidth is rising 20–25 per cent each year, yet the government expects us to believe forecasts that demand will only rise from average download speeds of 25Mbps to 49Mbps in the decade to 2026? It doesn’t add up.

There has been no accountability for the disastrous change of course inflicted on the country by the former communications minister and now prime minister, and there never will be.

Tuesday night’s questioning over the NBN in Senate estimates hearings about NBN Co’s communications chief Karina Keisler’s retweets, or even the fast connection to Malcolm Turnbull’s mansion in Point Piper, may generate some gotcha moments. But such exchanges but do not ultimately advance the cause of public accountability for our largest and most important infrastructure project.

Sometimes questioning does go to the heart of what is happening right now with the NBN, as when the Greens’ still-newish senator Jordan Steele-John asked whether the NBN would be able to generate enough revenue from consumers to remain profitable and stay off the government’s books. An important question, which Fifield interrupted and took himself, leading to the following unsatisfying exchange, in which the minister started to repeat the line about Labor’s NBN costing an “extra $30 billion” and claimed the Coalition’s NBN would cost consumers $500 less per year:

Fifield: When you’re talking about affordability, our approach will see what consumers pay being significantly less than would have been the case if we’d proceeded with the approach of our predecessors …

Steele-John: Minister, with respect, many of the elements you’ve just outlined are disputable and are disputed by people with far more technical qualifications than either of us …

At least Steele-John was being honest. Commentator after commentator, headline after headline point out that the NBN is under threat: of having its lunch cut by competitors like 5G or breakaway fibre networks; of falling short of revenue targets as telcos pile on pressure for wholesale price cuts; of major writedown and bargain-basement privatisation; of redundancy.

The only person not under threat, not even raising a sweat, is Malcolm Turnbull.

A tweeter called Angry Granny thought news of the PM’s fibre connection would be his “let them eat cake” moment.

On the contrary, he’ll be fine.

The second link below this article has been updated to reflect that, contrary to reporting in The Australian on February 28, Geoff Cousins was the president of, rather than “formally controlled”, the charity.

since this morning

Jobs minister Michaelia Cash was forced to withdraw “disgraceful and sexist” comments she made in estimates today, threatening to “name every young woman” in Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s office, over whom, she claimed “rumours in this place abound”. Bill Shorten has updated [$] his pecuniary interests, showing that a charity, of which Geoff Cousins was the president, paid for the Opposition leader’s charter flights in North Queensland and a tour of the Great Barrier Reef. Federal Independent MP Andrew Wilkie says the poker machine and pub arm of supermarket giant Woolworths has been spying on its punters in an effort to do “whatever it takes” to boost profits. in case you missed it

The Guardian reports that ABC executives Michelle Guthrie and Alan Sunderland failed repeatedly during a heated Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night to identify any factual errors in Emma Alberici’s coverage of tax policy. The AFR’s James Eyers suggests [$] the Hayne royal commission, by focusing on mortgage fraud, could ultimately recommend the banking industry move away from commission-based payments. Allan Asher, formerly of the ACCC, writes in The Conversation that the NBN faces irrelevance in cities as competitors build faster, cheaper alternatives. by Darryn King Theatre Ivo van Hove: It’s only theatre The prolific director is bringing jumbotron Shakespeare to the Adelaide Festival by Thornton McCamish Archive Thinking caps on Where has demand driven our universities?