That is a joke right, all the noalition will do is drag the economy down a put 200 thousand people out of work.
They look after the 1% and good luck to the rest.

Really,

That's why unemployment was at a record low of 4%, and the lowest paid workers got the greatest increase in real wages than under any labor government.

SM,
Seriously you must know very little about the industry?

Actually I'm involved in the restoration of the exchange that was recently burned down at Somerton NSW. Most of the customers require line conditioning such as VF Amplifiers and Line Extenders just for voice traffic alone. The limited ADSL service that some of them have will be as good as it will ever get.
Customer cable distances in excess of 20Km are common in such areas and having repeaters every 100m is ridiculous - even in metropolitan areas and makes no financial sense. Providing 200 repeaters for a few dozen customers?

Cat5 and Cat6 cabling accounts for over 95% of installations even today?
What installations? Internal building cabling sure but not out in the streets! Even ignoring the vast difference in data capacity, replacing existing copper cable with twisted pair would be more expensive than fibre.

Rache,

Repeaters every 100m would be a bad idea, but that is not what I suggested. I was also discussing a hypothetical green fields installation where repeaters / switches could extend the range of CAT6 from 120m from the node to say 240m to deliver 1Gb/s to households.

The problems we have now is precisely because the individual pairs run up to 20km. However, the pairs are usually accommodated in multi pair cables to local distribution boxes before branching out in single pair cables to the houses. The single pair cables are usually far shorter, in the region of a few 100m, The FTTN option would mean replacing the multicore cables with FO and using the shorter runs of single pairs to supply broad band to the individual houses. As the final runs of replacing these single core cables is about 80% of the total upgrade cost, this is a significant saving over the present NBN plan. This has been done successfully in the UK delivering 80Mb/s to most households at less than 25% of the cost of what the NBN is planning now.

It should be noted that there is nothing stopping the replacement of the individual pairs with FO either later when 80Mb/s is insufficient, or if the particular existing cable is damaged.