“If the Australian public was misinformed about these [NBN] issues it was in large part a consequence of the unwillingness of the mainstream media to pay ... any substantive attention to what was going on here,” Mr Turnbull told just under 200 CommsDay delegates on Monday. “They’ve got no interest in people who are actually hands-on and really know what they are doing [and] are either building and managing networks in the real world, as many of you are here, or [who have] in fact designed the technologies that are allowing that to happen,” he said. That's why he had taken it upon himself to go back to his journalistic roots and interview broadband experts himself, posting the results on his YouTube channel. One recent video shows Mr Turnbull interviewing NBN field workers at Blacktown, in Sydney's west. “That’s one of the reasons why I interviewed John [Cioffi] and Federico [Guillen] this morning. And I’ll put that up on our YouTube channel and a lot of people [will] see it. The reason I’m doing that is because I have genuinely despaired of preparedness of the mainstream media here. There seems to have been ... I’m not saying it’s bias, I think it's a combination of indolence and a lack of curiosity. I mean, I used to be a journalist and I find this whole area fascinating.” Mr Turnbull first sprayed the Australian technology media in July 2012, when he used Twitter to ask the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's technology and games editor, Nick Ross, whether he worked for the ABC or NBN Co, the company set up by Labor to build the fibre national broadband network. He argued with Ross after the editor published a number of articles that questioned whether Mr Turnbull’s NBN was the right one for the nation.

He sparred with technology journalists again in October 2012, at the CommsDay forum in Melbourne, naming three journalists he disagreed with. Mr Turnbull continued his crusade at the IT media Kickstart Forum on the Gold Coast in February and again during a Google Hangout with Fairfax Media readers in August. “I remember John Cioffi was unable to get himself interviewed on the ABC,” he said, referring to the man who has been labelled as the “father of DSL” and has assisted in making broadband go faster over copper using VDSL2 technology with fine-tuned algorithms that eliminate line noise. During Mr Turnbull's speech on Monday, ABC reporter Jake Sturmer corrected the minister on Twitter, saying that he had interviewed Mr Cioffi at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam. Mr Turnbull fired back that the interview was done only after the federal election.

NBN road bumps ahead Mr Turnbull also used his speech to warn about “bumps along the way” of his NBN rollout. The task of getting the NBN back on track was a daunting challenge and the Labor government relied on “heroic assumptions” with its rollout, he said. Speed misconceptions He also moved to correct what he perceived to be a common misconception about speed. He said that data usage could go up but that speeds did not need to go up at the same time.

“Data consumption can continue to grow without a correlated growth in line speed,” he said. He said that while data usage was growing, it was at a slower rate than between 2007 and 2012. In 2008, he said Cisco’s first VNI index predicted consumer use of internet traffic (in terms of volume) would grow at an annual rate of 49 per cent over the half-decade from 2007 to 2012. The Cisco prediction turned out to be “extraordinarily accurate”, Mr Turnbull said. But Cisco's most recent VNI, released in June 2013, forecasts growth of just 23 per cent for total consumer use of data over the five years from 2012 to 2017, he said. “Rather than data volumes doubling every two years, now they are doubling every four years,” he said. “[There] is still very rapid growth, but not nearly as intimidating to carriers as it was.”

Demands Labor cabinet documents be released Mr Turnbull also used his speech to demand Labor release cabinet documents from when it was in power, which reportedly show that a banking firm told Labor its NBN’s value was much less than expected. At the same time, Mr Turnbull defended the Coalition’s refusal to release the advice given by public servants on its election to government, known as the “Blue Book”. He said he didn't personally make the decision to refuse publishing the advice — “That’s taken by an official in the department,” Mr Turnbull said — and that public servants needed to speak with candour and without the fear of their advice being made public through freedom of information laws. “It is important that the advice that public servants give their ministers is frank and fearless...

“If every bit of written advice public servants gave ministers was to be published, journalists would [have a] field day. [But] it wouldn't be a field day for very long because all of the advice would then be given orally. There needs to be a degree of candour,” Mr Turnbull said. Follow IT Pro on Twitter