OPINION Australia's new communications minister, Mitch Fifield, the man who will be responsible for getting the National Broadband Network constructed, holds the Senate seat that was formerly held by Richard Alston.

That's right, the same Alston who was John Howard's communications minister, the same man who was convinced that the main reason people wanted faster download speeds was to look at porn.

We have to hope that Fifield is not cut from the same cloth.

But then, does it really matter whether the NBN is the responsibility of a person who has technical nous or not? After the Liberal-National coalition made it a political issue, the NBN has been reduced to another plodding project that will be rolled out painfully and probably be finished in 2038. By which time, I'll probably be six feet underground, with the epitaph on my grave being: "He died waiting for the NBN".

When the Coalition was campaigning for the 2013 elections, Malcolm Turnbull, who was touted as Australia's Mr Internet, made the NBN an issue of cost: his party would spend $29.5 billion on a network that would provide fibre to the node, he told us, while Labor's NBN, which they claimed would cost $44 billion, would actually consume $90-odd billion.

Recently, it turned out that Turnbull was out by tens of billions in these estimates. A new figure of $55.9 billion was provided for the so-called multi-technology mix NBN of the Coalition. That's what Labor would have spent on an NBN that gave us fibre to the premises.

There is no guarantee that next year we will not have a fresh estimate that goes well beyond the $55.9 billion figure. There's a lot of elasticity in these figures, much like Pinocchio's nose.

In 2013, the NBN was an election issue because there was a big point of difference: Labor was pushing an FTTP network, while the Coalition was behind an FTTN set-up.

But when the 2016 poll comes around, Labor can no longer promise an FTTP network. By then, work on the multi-technology mix network will be so advanced that Labor, were it to win, would only be able to make any changes after first completing what the Coalition has started – a real dog.

The FTTN idea would not be so be bad were it not for the condition of the copper that has to carry data from the node to a house. A few days' rain in any suburb and people become aware of how badly damaged the copper is, because data speeds drop to a crawl.

In August, I spent a few weeks in Bangalore, and a couple of days in Singapore. The contrast between these two places could not be greater, the former a chaotic, crowded city, and the latter orderly and organised. But both had one thing in common: the internet speeds were much faster than in Australia. My views about Bangalore have not changed much from my last visit in 2004. But the internet has improved by leaps and bounds. In Singapore, on the 14th floor of an apartment complex, the speeds were great.

Most countries have now overtaken Australia in network speeds. If India, with all its corruption, can build a fast network, why can't Australia do so? It is really a crying shame.