Morrow’s compensation makes him Australia’s second highest paid Government employee (the term ‘public servant’ seems a bit dated nowadays).

The only one paid more than him is Australia Post boss Ahmed Fahour, who is being paid around $4.8 million year to revamp the service, which involves sacking staff and reducing the frequency of postal deliveries.

Morrow may well be worth the money, which includes bonuses based on upon meeting performance targets. It is certainly on a par with what the bosses of other leading telcos earn, but he should not be congratulating himself too much just yet. Those performance targets are no longer so hard to reach.

He was also asked about the salaries of other NBN Co senior executives, which he refused to disclose, citing commercial confidence.

Morrow did say that under his stewardship the company has “reinvigorated” effort, morale and performance, and said “we are proud of the momentum and the progress we have made to stabilise the rollout.”

He said the company won’t share any specific financial details until later in the year, but that “revenue targets have been met and our expenditure has been managed within targets.”

What he did not say is that those targets have been radically revised down since the new Government was elected in September last year. And it is almost exactly a year since the NBN under the Labor Government also congratulated itself for meeting targets is had previously made much less ambitious.

It’s an old trick. If you’re having trouble reaching your targets, simply replace then with other targets that are easier achieve. Then, when you reach them, or better still exceed them, use that as evidence of how well you’re doing. That is exactly what seems to be happening now.

It is now more than six months since the first major downward revision of the NBN’s targets under the Coalition. Back then Communications Minister Malcom Turnbull said he was disappointed that he had to break his pre-election promises regarding the NBN, and that it would cost more and take longer than he had said.

New targets were then set, which NBN Co – surprise, surprise – has exceeded. Morrow can hardly be blamed (or credited) for that – he has had barely 100 days in the job – but it does make for a pleasing narrative now that the earlier promises are largely forgotten.

As of 30 June, the NBN was “ready for service” at 658,000 premises,. NBN Co says it has activated about 210,000 homes and businesses, with 380,000 brownfield premises were ready for service and 105,000 activated.

NBN Co said it has passed 111,000 greenfield premises and activated about 46,000. It said it has overcome earlier issues with housing estates and shopping centres. NBN Co switched on 366 fixed wireless facilities in the financial year just ended, providing access for about 112,000 premises. There are now 16,000 Australians on the fixed wireless network.

“While we still have a way to go on customer satisfaction during the installation process in particular, we have identified some of the root causes behind some of the more common poor customer experiences,” said Morrow. “We will work hard to bring our scores up.

“We are heading in the right direction and are very focused on creating an environment for our people that engenders success and translates to quicker access for all Australians to a fast, affordable NBN.”

NBN Co is indeed moving ahead, but it was always going to in any case. Labor was widely criticised for connecting so few premises, but made the point that the connection process was not linear and that a lot of infrastructure work would need to be done first before large numbers of premises came online.

The company has now signed a deal with Telstra to conduct a construction pilot which will see 1,000 nodes trialled in a fibre-to-the-node deployment across Queensland and New South Wales. It is the pilot for the national FTTN rollout, which will replace the former Government’s fibre-to-the premises plan for the majority of installations.

The company's 'success' needs to be put in context. It is vastly different to the one initiated under Labor, and Turnbull has already broken several election promises regarding the NBN’s cost and schedule. In that environment, keep expectations low is a sound strategy.