Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is biased is citing premises passed at an really phase in a project which deliberately planned to roll out difficult sites first. Of course there were not many premises passed, that is meaningless without context.
It wasn't though. The rollout follows political seats exactly to the street. In Brisbane this means that it followed the border of marginal ALP seats that cross the river and back again instead of doing adjacent houses. It's also not meaningless 5 years into a project that was announced 7 years prior.
It's a once-in-100 years project to create infrastructure with a lifetime of the same order. It involved replacing nearly 100% of the country's telecommunications infrastructure. 5 years is not particularly long in that context, and trashing it because you can't wait 7 years or even 10 years instead of 5 in exchange for a vastly inferior outcome is just utter stupidity.
So yes, measuring rollout numbers 5 years in is meaningless.