Yes but they didn't win. Instead they squandered government on in-fighting and backstabbing.

Truly Kevin Rudd can be credited with remarkable vision for proposing the NBN in the form that he did and it is a great pity it did not come to conclusion.

Labor/Rudd/Gillard/all the shadowy Labor background figures gets the blame for the "true" NBN not happening because they just could help themselves fighting and grasping at the crown.

Er, what? Labor came up with the idea of the NBN and started it. The Coalition then stopped building it properly and switched it to the watered-down version when they gained power. The Coalition deserves the blame here.

Rudd was promising the NBN since I was in primary, and it didn't happen after two terms. The insane amount of in-fighting in the last two years before the election didn't give me much hope.

I mean, ultimately I voted for the Pirate Party, but you can't blame people for not having faith that Labor would achieve in their third term something they'd fail to achieve in the previous two. Keeping someone in power despite not fulfilling their promises is how you get Howard.

Labor losing the election while the NBN was still ramping up allowed the coalition to ride in and dismantle it while it was still vulnerable

The parent is saying that the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd battles lost them power. It's a narrative which probably has some truth to it.

It's also worth noting that Labor was slow rolling out the NBN. They did have 6 years in power, and didn't get NBN in the hands of many people at all.

Yes it was a big project, but it's hard to argue that more speed was impossible.

It's very easy to argue that. Thousands of people to train, thousands of connections to plan, thousands of pits to retro fit, asbestos to handle. Business to be created, processes, negotiations with Telstra.

The biggest problem was not going fibre to the pit. It would have saved one of the most expensive parts of the operation - the lead in to the house.