Labor’s version of the National Broadband Network was “one hurdle” away from being on track to be completed on budget and on time, according to the previous chief executive of the company rolling out the network.

Mike Quigley, who stepped down from the role at NBN Co in October, says while the Coalition’s policy was “legitimate”, he did not want history rewritten to say there was mismanagement on the original project.

“It was a huge job and we hit a few hurdles but we basically had one more problem and the network could have been built in the timeframe and on budget,” he told Guardian Australia.

“People who worked on it put their heart and souls into it and it wasn’t a shambles. I don’t want people walking away from this to rewrite history and say it was in disarray. It wasn’t.”

Quigley said the last big hurdle was finalising contracts for digging holes for the NBN infrastructure.

“I expected the most difficult part of the project to be the huge IT systems we have to deal with – I didn’t think we were going to have a problem with digging holes in the ground,” he said.

“But these companies were used to building bridges, roads, things that were in one location, they weren’t used to working all over the country.”

Quigley cited an example of hiring a contractor in the Northern Territory that failed to build any part of the infrastructure NBN Co needed for 18 months until the company stepped in.

He said there were companies that were “performing badly”, but some followed a learning curve while others dropped out of the project.

“We knew we were handling taxpayers’ money and we were always aware of it,” he said. “We expected to be scrutinised and so we should be, but there was a lot of misrepresentation.

“If you asked the average person in the street if we were on budget they would say we were way over budget. Well we weren’t, we were on track to be on budget.

“If you asked the average person on the street our take-up rate was very low – in fact our take-up rate was exceptionally high.”

Quigley named The Australian and the Australian Financial Review as particularly critical in their coverage but said negative perceptions of the project were also fuelled by the opposition.

“It’s [confronting issues] the usual way of building a project, there were people trying to paint this as a disaster from beginning to end and it wasn’t,” he said.

Asked if there was anything he would have done differently, Quigley said: “You do think, should I have been more conservative? But the timescales are already set for you, the time frames are already put out there for you so there’s not much you can do.”

Quigley said with the benefit of hindsight he would have liked NBN Co to use its final construction model from the start.

“Towards the end we realised there was a lot more work we could build ourselves than we initially thought,” he said.

This week NBN Co, now headed by Ziggy Switkowski, handed a review of the project to the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

The review looked at how much it would cost to continue to build Labor’s network and was handed to Turnbull this week after he initially gave the board 60 days to deliver it.

It is not known when the review will be made public.