Prime Minister Julia Gillard scored the opposition for again fusing politics on the national broadband network project and this time around by dragging the names of two senior NBN Co executives to the alleged bribery scandals that occurred in Asia and Latin America.

Ms Gillard said on her initial press conference for 2011 that opposition leader Tony Abbott was merely injecting dirty politics on the NBN issue and smearing the reputation of NBN Co's leadership was his latest way of pulling down the $36 billion telecommunication federal initiative.

Giant French telco Alcatel-Lucent has been recently involved in allegations that it paid handsome amount of money to corner big contracts in Asia and Latin America, an occasion that the Coalition immediately seizes by insinuating that NBN Co's current roster of executives may have been actively involved in the affair.

Alcatel-Lucent used to employ Mike Quigley and Jean-Pascal Beaufret as senior executives, who now respectively head the Australian broadband project as chief executive and chief financial officer.

However, both Quigley and Beaufret were not implicated in the ensuing inquiry on the bribery issue, in which Alcatel-Lucent was eventually made to pay some $US137 million as payment for its wrongdoing.

Despite the clearing of their names, Abbott insisted that Ms Gillard needs to squarely address the issue and deal with the serious questions elicited by the incidents as he stressed that "the regulatory authorities found that Alcatel was bedevilled with lax management and practices."

The opposition leader also raised alarm on the way Quigley might be running the billion-dollar NBN project, highlighting concerns that the broadband roll out may encounter the same issues that hounded the French telecommunication firm.

Notwithstanding, Ms Gillard called Abbott's latest actions as purely politics and a smear one at that as she asserted that the opposition's tactics were obviously bordering on "a personal smear against a highly regarded businessman."

The prime minister reminded Abbott that Quigley is prominent Australian and is globally acknowledged for his expertise on the telecommunication field as she called on the Coalition to refrain from playing smear politics, if only to thwart federal efforts on the controversial NBN project.