Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications. I refer the minister to this email from a constituent living in the suburb of Kirwan in Townsville, where there are only 59 available ADSL ports for more than 300 premises. Further, in the Townsville CBD where the NBN has been rolled out, many, many businesses are unable to connect to the network. Can the minister please advise this House how the government plans to fix this NBN mess in my city of Townsville?

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question and recall the broadband forums we have held in consultations in his electorate. I can say that the coalition is acutely aware that many parts of Australia have no broadband at all. In fact it is estimated that about two million premises have no broadband at all, which is exactly the same number as in 2007. So, after six years, nothing has been improved. That is why, by the end of the month, I will have a report from my department setting out the ranking of Australia's neighbourhoods in order of their broadband needs, and the NBN's rollout will be prioritised accordingly. So neighbourhoods in the honourable member's electorate which have a high-priority need will be dealt with in priority, as opposed to the current case where, as the member for Chifley knows well, the fibre network is being rolled out in areas of his electorate where there are not one but two high-speed broadband services already available.

One of the problems in the central business district of Townsville is that the previous government, for purely ideological reasons, refused to allow NBN Co. to connect its fibre to a multiplex in the basement of an office building or a block of apartments and then connect to the copper network in the building, which in modern buildings is of very high quality. This is pure ideology. As a consequence, nearly half of all the premises in Townsville that are supposedly passed with NBN fibre cannot connect at all. We are trialling the fibre-to-the- basement technology, which is commonplace everywhere else in the world, and that will ensure that the CBD of Townsville gets connected in a timely way.

The Labor Party has often struggled with getting over these final hurdles, such as actually connecting people to the network. So imagine my surprise yesterday when the former NBN Co. CEO said, 'Were it not for one more problem and the network could have been built on time and on budget.' He said, 'I didn't think we were going to have a problem with digging holes in the ground.' Given that the project involved digging holes in every street and every front garden in Australia, it is remarkable this problem came as a surprise. It does cause me to wonder what the proponents of other mismanaged ventures could have said as they reflected on the failures: 'I didn't think we would have problems with icebergs'—captain of the Titanic. 'I didn't think we would have a problem with frostbite'—Napoleon.

All of this disastrous mismanagement is a consequence once again of Labor not doing their homework, and once again it falls to the coalition to clean up Labor's mess.