Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) places on the record that:

(a) under the previous Government, at the time of the last election just 2 per cent of premises across Australia could access the National Broadband Network (NBN); and

(b) since the election the NBN rollout has ramped up significantly and today around one in ten premises can access the NBN and under the NBN’s new Corporate Plan, by June 2018, three in four premises will have access to the NBN;

(2)   notes that:

(a) the NBN’s 2016-2018 Corporate Plan reveals that a full fibre to the premises (FTTP) NBN could not be completed until 2026 at the earliest and could be as late as 2028—six to eight years later than the current Government’s plan; and

(b) the NBN 2016-2018 Corporate Plan reveals that a full FTTP NBN would cost between $20 and $30 billion dollars more than the current Government’s plan; and

(3) recognises that it is essential to deliver fast broadband to Australians sooner—not force Australians with no or poor broadband to wait more than a decade for the NBN

Across Australia, and particularly in my electorate of Roberson on the New South Wales Central Coast, the NBN rollout is speeding up and more families and businesses are connecting to superfast broadband. In fact, since the last election, the NBN rollout has ramped up significantly. Until that point, despite all the fanfare and the $6 billion of taxpayers' money spent under the former Labor government—and despite the great big red button that was pushed in my electorate in the lead-up to the September 2013 election—just two per cent of premises across Australia could access the NBN at the time of the election, including just over 200 premises connected and using a service in my electorate of Robertson.

In contrast, today in Robertson we have a massive 67,300 premises either ready for service, under construction or on the rollout plan up until December next year. That includes 12,100 homes and businesses that are ready for service and another 55,200 that can expect it to be connected in coming months. It is an example of what is happening right across Australia today. Areas that are using superfast broadband include suburbs in my electorate such as Gosford, North Gosford, West Gosford, Point Frederick, East Gosford, parts of Springfield and some premises in Narara. In coming months we are expecting more than 33,000 more premises to be added in another 27 suburbs. These include part or all of Point Clare, Koolewong, Tascott, Bensville, Blackwall, Booker Bay, Daleys Point, Davistown, Empire Bay, Ettalong Beach, Green Point, Hardys Bay, Horsefield Bay, Kilcare, Kilcare Heights, parts of Kincumber, Patonga, Pearl Beach, Phegans Bay, Pretty Beach, Saratoga, St Huberts Island, Umina Beach, Wagstaffe, Woy Woy, Woy Woy Bay and Yattalunga—all this in just two years. Construction will also start before the end of the year in another 13,300 homes and businesses and another eight suburbs on top of this, while another 8,600 premises are on the rollout plan for construction to start in the first half of next year.

With the NBN rollout speeding up across the Central Coast, I am holding a series of listening posts in my electorate, right across the community. We started them last month. It is a fantastic thing to hear from people about their expectations, about their desires for superfast broadband. We have held them at the Jasmine Greens Park Kiosk at Umina Beach and we also spoke to residents of Hardys Bay, Kilcare and Wagstaffe at the Hardys Bay Club. I am really looking forward to returning home from parliament this week to listen to residents of Copacabana, where construction is well underway, this Friday at the Alligai Bay Cafe between 2 pm and 4 pm. We are also off to Macmasters Beach. On 24 September we will be at Loo Loo's Coffee Shack between 10 am and midday. We are holding a listening post at Gosford on Saturday, 3 October from 11 am till 1 pm in the wonderful new-look Imperial Centre and will also be at the Davistown RSL on 6 October from 11 am till 1 pm.

We are doing these events, not just in these locations but in many locations around the electorate, because we hear so many stories about how people want to connect to faster internet. For example, Vince from Pearl Beach was telling me that the internet is so slow in his community at the moment that he brings his wireless mobile device home after a long day at work to be able to access the internet. I am pleased to say that work started in Pearl Beach in December last year and residents of Pearl Beach should be able to access this service of the NBN early next year. I am really looking forward to heading out to the Pearl Beach Community Hall next month to hear more stories.

I will give an example of just how a faster rollout can benefit my community and communities across Australia. NIB have decided to locate a new service centre right in the heart of the CBD in Gosford, bringing 100 new jobs. Fast broadband was one of the key reasons they indicated they moved to Gosford and not to another region. So with 600 new jobs also coming into Gosford in a purpose-built Commonwealth agency—a key election commitment of this coalition government to the Central Coast—we will see even more momentum in a city connected with 21st century technology.

This fast broadband rollout across Australia is thanks to our new mixed technology rollout strategy. A full fibre-to-the-premise NBN would cost between $20 billion and $30 billion more than the current government's plan and could not be completed until 2026 at the earliest and could even be as late as 2028—that is, 13 years away. There is evidence of this slow progress but I am very pleased to commend our superfast broadband rollout to the House.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with pleasure I rise to contribute to the debate on the honourable member for Robertson's motion on the NBN. The government was elected on a platform of no surprises and no excuses but the story of the NBN under this government has been all surprises and all excuses. I am astounded that those opposite would want to draw attention to the most recent NBN corporate plan, but I am more than happy to let them keep kicking own goals.

The corporate plan released in August this year reveals that under the Abbott government the cost of the NBN has nearly doubled since April 2013 when then shadow minister, Malcolm Turnbull, opposition leader Tony Abbott and hologram Sonny Bill Williams promised that they could do this for $29.5 billion. This is the third time the cost of this Abbott government's second-rate network has blown out. It blew out to $41 billion in December 2013 and increased to $42 billion in August 2014. The 2016-18 corporate plan revealed it will now cost up to $56 billion—a blow out of $26.5 billion. So after doubling the deficit this government has almost doubled the cost of the country's biggest infrastructure program. So much for superior economic management! They said they were better than us. They said it would be faster, sooner and more affordable—fail, fail, fail!

The financial return to taxpayers from this government's second-rate NBN has also crashed. In December 2013 we were assured that the rate of return would be up to 5.3 per cent but the recent corporate plan reveals that it will be 3.5 per cent at best. The Minister for Communications has no-one else to blame for this cost blow-out. It has happened because he made extraordinarily poor policy decisions and erroneous assumptions. Here are just a few.

The minister assured us that his renegotiations with Telstra would be completed 'speedily' and 'certainly by June 2014'. In reality the agreement did not even commence until 26 June this year, so he missed it by about 12 months. Minister Turnbull assured us that the large-scale rollout of fibre to the node would commence in mid-2014—and I heard the member talking about this—but in reality full access to the copper was delayed until June this year and the large-scale rollout of fibre to the node still has not started. The great pre-election NBN fallacy that all Australians would have access to 25 megabits per second by 2016 was blown out of the water. No wonder the member's motion does not mention connections by 2016. It must be very embarrassing for those opposite that that promise did not even last the year 2013.

According to the corporate plan, less than half of all Australians will have access to the NBN by June 2017. This is the minister who promised the NBN for everyone by 2016, and now it is half the population a year later. There are other factors that are at play here, as the University of Melbourne's Professor Rod Tucker recently pointed out for The Conversation:

Also, the cost of repairing and maintaining Telstra's ageing copper network was likely underestimated, as was the cost of retraining and maintaining a workforce with the wider range of skills needed to install and maintain the multi-technology-mix network—costs that are unique to the MTM.

In the space of two years, the lower-cost deal the Coalition spruiked to Australian voters has turned out to be not so affordable after all.

How did it all come to this? We all remember the much lauded strategic review. This was the review the minister got his mates to put together with one goal in mind: to conform to a pre-existing view that fibre to the premises was not the way to go. But there is only one problem: the document is dodgy. The minister himself confirmed the flawed nature of this document in an interview just last month, when he said:

The strategic review took six weeks. This plan—

the recent corporate plan—

has taken a year … I think the truth is, prior to this work being completed we didn't really know how much it was going to cost. So much of the input was questionable.

These are the minister's own words. So the document that provided the catalyst for this shift in approach—from a world-class fully fibre network to this second-rate mixed approach—is so flawed the minister himself does not even stand by it. The document that made all of these delays and blow-outs possible is no longer worth the paper it is written on. It is an utter disgrace. The NBN is now a company hamstrung by policy madness which has driven this government. As Professor Tucker further stated:

The Coalition sold the Australian public a product that was supposed to be fast, one-third the cost and arrive sooner than what Labor was offering us. Instead the Coalition's NBN will be so slow that it is obsolete by the time it's in place, it will cost about the same as Labor's fibre-to-the-premises NBN, and it won't arrive on our doorsteps much sooner.

By my reckoning, we didn’t get a good deal.

The problem we have here is a minister more focused on his personal ambitions than on doing his day job, a bloke who has talked a big game but absolutely failed to deliver. Maybe if this minister concentrated on what he is supposed to be doing for the people of Australia then we would get some results.

Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

TE Lawrence once wrote:

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

The trouble with the former Minister Conroy is that he was actually asleep. It was a good idea, no doubt, and with good intention, I have no doubt, but without a plan for implementation it was merely hallucination. To think that a government and a government department and, with respect, the bureaucrats could do a better job than the private sector in building such a massive piece of infrastructure was arrogance personified. The overpromising and the underdelivering of the previous government is something that no doubt somebody will write a book about one-day. It was done on a drinks coaster. More fool you if you believe the numbers that were provided by the previous government. In four years they had no accounting. Labor left us with measures upon which we were based. We are now getting back on with the job and we are delivering an NBN that will be affordable to the people of Australia with the honesty and the accounting that it provides. We are not going to rewrite history.

In my electorate of Lyons, we have a number of communities that already have been connected with fibre to the premise: Triabunna, Midway Point, St Helens and Deloraine. With respect, these are the communities, and it was this technology that provided the most difficulties. When you are digging up backyards and you are having to drill holes through walls, these were the difficulties. With the headline speeds, though, of 100 megabits download and 40 megabits upload, only 10 per cent of people around Australia have taken up these feeds. Eighty-seven per cent of people are choosing speeds of 25 megabits per second or less. Labor talk about gigabytes per second services. Nationally, five people out of a million connections, costing roughly $20,000 a month, have been able to access such services. Basic services with spots to such speeds cost hundreds if not thousands and depend very much on the volume required.

Much of my electorate will be connected very soon—in the first half of 2016—to fibre-to-the-node technology. It is a simpler technology which delivers the same headline speeds of 100 megabits down and 40 megabits up. The communities at Evandale and Dodges Ferry will be connected by the middle of next year, Evandale possibly earlier. Bicheno, Gravelly Beach, Brighton, Gagebrook, Campbelltown, Grindelwald, Lawitta, New Norfolk, Longford, Orford and Westbury will all be connected through fibre-to-the-node technology.

Fixed wireless is of course a very important technology for regional and rural electorates like Lyons. Already in Tasmania 27,810 premises are covered through wireless, with a final figure of 36,000—or roughly 12 per cent—to be connected. In my electorate of Lyons, the percentage is much higher. Headline speeds of 50 megabits down and 20 megabits up are truly comparable with anywhere in the world. Importantly, prices on offer for the packages in these areas are among the cheapest in the world. I think particularly of the communities that are very dependent on tourism, such as those around Coles Bay, that will very soon have connection to the NBN via wireless. There is a great story up at the Great Lake, where Peter and Kaylee Hattinger have access to wireless at the Great Lake Hotel. They speak very highly of the service they have. We were told that the cost was going to be roughly $2½ thousand per connection. On coming to government, however, we discovered the cost to be more like $4,300 per connection.

Satellite will also be an important connection technology in my electorate of Lyons. Labor did not care about regional Australia. They were more interested in getting connections in the areas around central Sydney and central Melbourne—areas that already had excellent ADSL connections. For the first time, regional Australia will be part of this. In Tasmania, with credible accounting and proper budgets, the project is well and truly back on track. We will be the first state completed in the country. We have a regional focus and Lyons will be the beneficiary.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is astonishing that members opposite would wish to draw attention to the shambles that is the coalition's policy on the National Broadband Network. On the critical issues of cost, timing and speed, the coalition fails on all three fronts. I will illustrate this by looking at the situation in my own electorate of Newcastle.

Stockton is at the northern end of my electorate. It is an idyllic seaside suburb with a tight-knit community that is just a few hundred metres as the crow flies from the centre of Newcastle. In May 2013, Stockton was added to the National Broadband Network rollout map. Residents who had long suffered from poor ADSL broadband access and quality were finally due to receive Labor's superfast fibre-to-the-premises NBN by 2016. To describe Stockton as having poor broadband access and quality is indeed a generous description of the current situation. For some residents, there was no access at all, and those who do have access have some of the slowest upload and download speeds in Australia. News of the NBN hook-up was most welcome. Frustrating drop-outs and video buffering would be replaced by 21st century, reliable, superfast, high-quality broadband right to their doorsteps. Stockton joined the rest of the Newcastle electorate on Labor's NBN rollout map, ensuring that every home and every business would have access by 2016.

But then the Abbott Liberal government was elected. The hopes of Stockton residents were dashed. Like the rest of my electorate, they were wiped off the rollout map altogether. We went from 100 per cent coverage for rollout by 2016 to zero. The Abbott Liberal government had hoped to placate Novocastrians with promises of services delivering a minimum of 25 megabits per second. While it was not the best service possible, it was at least an improvement on the existing ADSL coverage. But, as I believe all sides of this chamber know, that was nothing but a hollow commitment from a hollow government. Not long after being elected, even that promise was broken.

Fast forward to today: following a strong community campaign, Stockton is finally back on the NBN rollout map, with work due to commence in the second half of 2016. That is right—the work is due to commence at the end of 2016, at the very same time as residents under Labor's plan were actually expecting to be connected. It is quite astounding that the motion before us talks of an improved state of the NBN under this government. Any independent analysis makes clear that the coalition's NBN fails the Australian people on almost every front. Contrary to the three-word slogans prior to the election, where the coalition members argued that their NBN version would be faster, more affordable and rolled out sooner, we know from lived experience that they have failed on all counts.

Let's just take a look at the facts. On the issue of costs: before being elected the coalition promised their NBN was going to cost about $29.5 billion to build. In reality, we see something far different. The NBN corporate plan, released last month, confirmed that the costs of Malcolm Turnbull's inferior NBN had nearly doubled to $56 billion—so much for offering a more affordable NBN. On the issue of timing: before being elected, the government promised the NBN would be rolled out to all homes and businesses within three years—that is, by the end of 2016. But we know that is not going to be true either. And Malcolm Turnbull was alleged to be the best person to make sure this happened.

On the issue of speed, how does the coalition's NBN stack up? Australia is falling well behind our international peers and is failing to meet the needs of today, let alone those of the future. In 2009 Australia's average broadband download speed was ranked as 39th in the world. Since then our international reckoning has slipped to 59th place and the government's multi-technology mix could see our ranking fall to as low as 100th by 2020. Notwithstanding all these issues with the coalition's inferior broadband, it is the lack of vision and future proofing of the Minister for Communications that I find most astounding. His complete inability to understand the imperative to deliver 21st century technology to the Australian people—to every home and to every business—is worrying, to say the least. The digital divide that is being created across the country, within electorates and even within suburbs, is leading to greater inequality in Australia. Malcolm Turnbull is clearly too busy keeping an eye on getting the top job in this country to worry about his own portfolio responsibilities.

Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the motion brought to the House by the member for Robertson. The National Broadband Network is Australia's largest, most complex infrastructure project, reaching into every premises right across the country. It is the most expensive project ever undertaken, but it is also this because its distribution is by far the most complex.

This was a project whose origins were from a drinks coaster on the VIP: a great idea, but no plan for implementation. And we all know that if you do not plan, then you plan to fail. And that is exactly what happened with the implementation of the NBN.

This has been a story of a formidable turnaround. The NBN has done a remarkable job in getting this project back on track. At the time of the election it had missed every single target set for it, and by a very wide margin. It is good to say that the NBN is now meeting its targets. I would like to commend the minister for his work in getting the NBN back on track.

The NBN is now available to over 10 per cent of Australian premises, and by June 30 next year the NBN will be available to one in four Australian premises. By 2018, the NBN strives to have the service available to about three-quarters of Australian premises. This project is moving along very quickly.

In my seat of Lindsay more than 22,000 premises are already in service. Brownfield sites and new developments have worked to bring this together. There is work on a further 6,000 premises currently underway.

Already parts of Agnes Banks, Cambridge Gardens, Cambridge Park, Cranebrook, Jamisontown, Kingswood, Londonderry, Penrith, Penrith CBD, South Penrith, Llandilo and Werrington Downs are connected to the NBN. Emu Plains—where it was great to have the minister come out and visit in May—has become one of four suburbs across New South Wales and Queensland selected to take part in a construction pilot which is designed to speed up the rollout plan. This program takes place, and homes and businesses that already sit within the footprint of the hybrid fibre coaxial, or HFC, networks deployed by Optus and Telstra potentially can be included in the trial. Following commercial agreements signed last December, these networks will be progressively incorporated into the NBN and will be used to deliver fast and affordable broadband services to homes and businesses right across Australia and the Lindsay electorate.

Many Lindsay residents, when we announced this in May, agreed with Belinda Hill, who said, 'That's fantastic news for residents of Emu Plains. Well done, Fiona.' Jason Cooper stated, 'Good news.' Margaret Ware just said that it was great. Around 40 per cent of premises in Lindsay are currently passed by these HFC networks. Other premises will be connected to the NBN via other technologies, including multitechnology rollout. The NBN will be providing services of 100 megabits per second download when the HFC service is launched next year. By 2017 a technology upgrade will result in the HFC network operated by the NBN Co being capable of offering speeds of one gigabyte per second for download and 100 megabits per second for upload. These networks will be upgraded so they are among the most advanced in the world by 2017. Although the $30 billion differential is still there, NBN Co's conclusion is that, by the time the differential of the all-fibre approach is undertaken, it will take until 2026, and quite possibly 2028, to be completed.

This project under the current strategy will be completed by 2020. The political opponents of ours who say that we should go back to an all-fibre model are saying to the millions of Australians who want NBN and who want to see it sooner that, if they vote for Labor, they will wait for another six or eight years. Some of them will have to wait for more than a decade. Simply, that is not acceptable to us. We are determined to see the NBN. We are determined to see more Australians have access to very fast broadband as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. I commend again the member for Robertson for bringing this motion to the House.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When it comes to broadband in this country, Australians know two things. The first is that we need a modern network—because our economy needs it, regional communities need it and future generations of Australians need it. The second thing they know, and they know deeply, is that every single thing that the Abbott government promised would happen with the NBN is not happening and that everything that is happening in this country with the NBN is a throwback to when the coalition were last in government. They are taking us back to a situation we have experienced before, with a complete inability to get broadband rolled out in this nation.

They promised fibre to the node—their version of the NBN—would be at scale and rolling out at full speed. It is not happening. They promised every home and business would have access to 25 megabits per second download speeds by the end of 2016. It ain't going to happen. They promised it would roll out cheaper. It is not happening. It is actually double the cost of what they promised. Finally, they promised that, by 2019, the entire network would be built. It is not going to happen. Every single thing they have promised is not occurring. These are problems of their own making.

The first fatal flaw is that fibre networks, by their very nature, take time to roll out and to get the speed of the rollout happening. They need time for the architecture, network planning, logistics and supply and labour arrangements to be put in place. All this takes time to build up, but, once it happens, you can start getting the rollout moving with quite a pace. But, the minute the government got into office, they pulled the handbrake on the entire process, largely through this cavalcade of review after review after review, sending the signal that they were not going to be proceeding in a way that would see the rollout occur by 2021, which is what was originally promised by the Labor in government.

They took time, for example, to negotiate the Telstra agreement. It took ages for that to happen. And what happened as a result of that agreement? We did not get an agreement about optic fibre. We did not get an agreement about a future network. We got an agreement to dust off the old copper network and to breathe life back into an old network that, time and again, has shown that it is incapable of dealing with the modern needs of businesses and homes in this country that require faster speeds. They have celebrated the return of copper when countries around the world are welcoming fibre. It is simply ridiculous that we are being forced as a nation to see the entire rollout shudder to a halt.

Where are we now? We are absolutely back to where we were when the coalition were last in government. Remember, the thing that occurred under their government was not the rollout of fibre; it was 19 separate broadband plans that attempted to deliver a better network and were incapable of doing so. This is the fault of one person—one person and one person only—and I am not talking about the Prime Minister, who is still regaled by the wonder of the operation of a fridge light. It is the man who is capable of explaining that to him and explaining the need for that to happen, the man who the PM has told us was responsible for practically inventing the internet, and that is Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth. He has been enamoured with question time performances that obsessed about Senator Conroy or wanted to tell us movie metaphor after movie metaphor and go through the dramatics, but do you know what? You do not see in question time the Minister for Communications over there explaining how well things are going, because he cannot. He cannot explain how they are going well, because they are not going well, because on every single measure this rollout has slowed down and ground down to a halt.

The opportunities are basically lost opportunities. There are frustrated communities. In my area, there are broadband blackspots, and we have worked for ages to get them fixed, in suburbs like Woodcroft. We finally got them onto the rollout map only to have them taken off the rollout map by this government then put back on the rollout map—but not the entire suburb, which was a broadband blackspot, being fixed; only half of the suburb. So you can go to Lakewood Drive in Woodcroft. The southern side has access to fibre to the home, fibre to the premises, but north of Lakewood Drive does not. Time and again I have appealed for Woodcroft to be included.

If the minister thinks that fibre to the node works, prove it. Show it. But do not let communities be stuck with a substandard network that is incapable of meeting their current needs. Everything the government have touched with broadband has turned to dust, and everyone is paying for it, other than them.

Debate adjourned.