The only reason Australia needed a NBN was because of the sale of Telstra as a vertically integrated monopoly. It should have been split from the start into wholesale and retail as happened in New Zealand. Apparently they were starting to roll out fibre when the sale was announced. It was politically good to sell it as a single unit at the time.

Then when the NBN was announced the opposition and specifically Tony Abbot lacked the vision to see the value and believed that it was just an advanced video game system. Given the power I believe he would have stopped the build entirely. Instead he handed it over to Malcom to "fix". Malcom in order to remain on the cabinet and hopefully push to become prime minister did as ordered and "destroyed" the NBN. The result is what we currently have. The present government cannot fix it because Malcom hung his entire political career on the NBN and to admit that it isn't working would be political suicide for the present government.

This issue seems to occur all over the world where you have fixed terms in politics and politicians who lack the guts to do what is right because they only need to do enough to get re-elected and long term plans are off the table.