Russell Matheson (Macarthur, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to start by thanking the member for Robertson, Lucy Wicks, for this excellent motion on the NBN rollout. The NBN has been a hot topic in my electorate of Macarthur this year and I have spoken on numerous occasions in this House about how quickly and extensively the NBN has been rolled out in my electorate—thanks to the tremendous support of the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull in his previous role as Minister for Communications.

A few months ago I proudly announced that preconstruction activities had commenced on 20,900 homes in Airds, Bradbury, Ambarvale, Rosemeadow, St Helens Park, Campbelltown, Englorie Park, Glen Alpine, Blair Athol, Eagle Vale, Woodbine and Kentlyn—a monumental achievement considering Labor did zero for Macarthur in the six years they were in power. Macarthur's NBN rollout has rightly been recognised by people on opposite sides of Sydney as a benchmark for the state. Tim Doubleday, for instance—a resident of Collaroy on Sydney's northern beaches—wrote to the Manly Daily in July this year to express his amazement. He wrote:

Macarthur federal Liberal MP Russell Matheson has secured a deal to see the national broadband network rolled out in 20,100 homes in his electorate up to three years ahead of its proposed schedule.

Of course Macarthur is no exception, with work underway or to be completed in areas covering 85 per cent of premises in NSW in the next three years.

In August, NBN Co released its corporate plan. It showed that the multitechnology mix initiated by the government after the last election is the most cost- and time-effective means of completing the NBN. The government's NBN strategy will deliver upgrades up to eight years sooner and at a cost around $30 billion lower than Labor's reckless all-fibre-to-the-premises alternative. The government's NBN is designed to provide a minimum 25 megabits per second to all homes and businesses and at least 50 megabits per second to 90 per cent of the premises in the fixed-line footprint. To put this in perspective, 25 megabits per second would allow each of five people on the same connection to watch—simultaneously—a different high-definition video stream.

The NBN rollout in Macarthur will provide an incredible boost to industry and to small- and medium-sized enterprises, not to mention to the thousands of family run businesses and start-ups. It will also transform the lives of the students and families living in Macarthur who have been crying out for faster internet—but who were ignored by Labor when in office. Amazingly, Labor and the unions appear to have targeted Macarthur in a bid to undermine, and mislead the public about, the NBN rollout. The only justification for this is that they are scared witless of the fact that this government is delivering in two years what they could not deliver in six.

According to a flyer that Labor was distributing, 'Macarthur needs fibre to the premises'. If Labor had bothered to do their research, they would know that half the premises in Macarthur can only get download speeds of nine megabits per second or less and that roughly 10,000 premises, or 17 per cent, are located in areas where the estimated median ADSL download speed is less than 4.8 megabits per second. The quality of Macarthur's internet is nearly twice as poor as the national average—a damning indictment. Does anyone in their right mind genuinely believe that these people are happy to remain with their current inadequate internet speeds for another decade while Labor wastes millions of dollars in taxpayer funds?

Another line favoured by Labor is that, by ditching their discredited NBN model, households in Macarthur will have superfast broadband speeds to the street corner—but that the service will crawl to old speeds when it gets to the 100 year-old copper network at their home. I contacted nbn co about this claim as it is something often bandied about in the media by Labor. Here is what they said:

Nbn co is now implementing a multitechnology model which involves using existing infrastructure where it makes sense to do so. The government has asked nbn co to use this approach to provide a minimum 25 megabits per second to all homes and businesses and at least 50 megabits per second to 90 per cent of the premises in the fixed-line footprint. Fibre to the node is one of the fixed-line technologies we will be deploying. Fibre is run from the exchange to a node in the street. It then uses the existing copper lines into people's homes to provide very fast broadband.

Here is the important part:

If copper is not capable of delivering adequate services to end users then nbn is committed to remediation works to bring it to the required standard.

The required standard, of course, is 25 megabits per second, which is 150 per cent faster than half my electorate currently gets. So not only am I surprised that Labor chose to fight the government on the NBN, considering their embarrassing record, but I actually encourage them, as it is something the government has a lot to say about and it is something we are incredibly proud of.

I had a chuckle recently when I looked at Labor's NBN flyer, which has a black and white photo of a group of workmen installing copper in the 1960s. The photo, of course, is meant to suggest that the government's NBN model is antiquated and out of date; yet a few weeks ago we launched Sky Muster, which is one of the highest capacity internet-providing satellites ever built. So, while we are launching this type of technology into orbit, vastly improving internet speeds in isolated and remote areas and rolling out the NBN years faster and billions of dollars cheaper, no doubt Labor will continue to deflect and deceive—but the electorate, no doubt, will know which side is playing with a straight bat and delivering for the community.

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a self-congratulatory motion by a self-congratulatory government. They do not mind singing their own praises, but, of course, out there in the community it is not quite the case. The former speaker almost made the case there of the use of antiquated copper. My local paper, The Bunyip, which serves Gawler and bits of the Barossa, had the headline on 19 November 2014 of 'NBN work begins … sort of'. That is basically the state of broadband in Australia under the Turnbull government, the Abbott-Turnbull government and probably soon the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, after all those boos at the New South Wales state council on the weekend, where we saw what the rank and file of the Liberal Party thought about Prime Minister Turnbull's performance as communications minister and now as Prime Minister.

Let us go back in time. What did the Howard government ever do about broadband, except to do this sort of patch-up job around the place in response to the National Party's advocacy? The Howard government did nothing. It sat on its hands on this copper network for years and years and years, through warning after warning after warning about how it might affect our national productivity. And then Labor comes to power, puts in place the building blocks for the National Broadband Network—and not before time—and does things like getting the entire copper network off Telstra, negotiating those arrangements, setting up the NBN and actually doing all the groundwork for what will be a great national project, the biggest infrastructure project in Australia's history.

If the Liberal Party had got behind the National Broadband Network and made it a bipartisan project, after the years of neglect in the Howard era, we would now be talking about fibre to the premise. That is what we would be talking about. We know what happened when we started talking about fibre to the premise. I remember, in this House, members opposite saying, 'You want it so you can play computer games,' and all this sort of nonsense. What we know now, with the advent of a whole range of industries, is that people need this not just for leisure, not just for enjoyment, but for work. You only have to go to the Barossa Valley, to Gawler, to the outer suburbs of Adelaide—or, indeed, any metropolitan city—or to the bush to find out that people need it now. Farmers need it; farmers desperately need it. Rural economies desperately need it. It is the end of the tyranny of distance. It is information at their fingertips.

What have the government done? They promised they would build it for $29.5 billion and they are now estimating it will cost $56 billion. So they have doubled the cost of it—that is what they have said—and this is for an inferior product. They are using fibre to the node—the old copper network. So we have had a massive blow-out financially. They have said that they would be able to roll out the copper network, fibre to the node, within three years—that is, by the end of 2016. That was a commitment they gave. That has now more than doubled to the end of 2020, seven years. So whereas the coalition broadband policy in 2013 said, 'It is forecast that the large scale rollout of any changes to the network design—such as implementing fibre to the node—would commence in mid 2014,' of course it has not.

And what suffers in all of this? Well, business suffers; communities suffer. In my own community, in Gawler, we have half the town on fibre to the premise and the other half on fibre to the node. That is what is going to happen. This former Minister for Communications was made Prime Minister in the dead of night in a desperate attempt to breathe life into a sclerotic government with bad polling. It has not quite worked out the way they expected, but we do have a whole lot of new faces at great cost to this country. But let's not pretend that this has been a successful government in broadband. Rather, they are saddling Australia with yesterday's technology.

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to commend the member for Robertson for bringing this motion to the House. It is very interesting listening to the former speaker—

Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thought you were going to say 'the former member' then!

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, the former speaker. He was talking about the things that are happening in our party, but I think they need to look at what is going on in their own party.

I would like to give you some updates about what is happening in the NBN in the Northern Territory. We are actually really delighted with the services that we are getting. There is a lot of hullabaloo about what is happening, but we are doing a great job in the Northern Territory, and I am really pleased. In fact, we have NBN being installed as we speak in my house in Marlow Lagoon, along with other houses in other areas. We have homes and businesses in Tiwi, Lyons, Leanyer, Wanguri, Casuarina, Anula, Moil, Wagaman, Wulagi, Alawa, Malak, Marrara, Karama, Stuart Park, Fannie Bay, Larrakeyah, Parap, The Gardens, Moulden, Rosebery, Woodroffe and, as I said, Marlow Lagoon and also Darwin city. All these suburbs have access to the NBN.

This government, under the leadership of the now Prime Minister, made sure where the need was greatest. We all know that Darwin is the capital of north Australia, and there is some fantastic work happening in north Australia, so it is absolutely essential that we have technology available to us.

I am really pleased that the NBN is rolling out. In fact, it is ahead of schedule in most cases. It is expected that, by the end of this year, the whole of Darwin and Palmerston, which covers my whole electorate of Solomon, will have access to the NBN. This is great news. Even in the next electorate over, in Lingiari, they will have NBN as well. There is some work happening now. Optus have said that from Litchfield to Palmerston, and also in Darwin, they will be calling in to make sure that areas will have access through Optus's service provisions, which is great news.

I also have to say that the take-up of the NBN seems to be going quite well. There have been some areas that were not addressed. We raised those with the former communications minister, and, as I said, he worked to make sure that those people had access to this technology. Mr Deputy Speaker, as you know, my career prior to politics was actually in the information technology and communications area, so I know how important it is to have access to the technology that we are employing in Solomon.

I really am delighted by the fact that we actually are getting on with the job. The former government had lots of whistleblowing. I know that Kevin Rudd came to town, and the candidate for Solomon then, who is now a staffer for Senator Peris, was there with all the hype and glamour and the TV cameras, but actually nothing happened. It was this government that ensured that we delivered the NBN. As I said, by the end of this year, the NBN in my electorate of Solomon, covering all of Darwin and Palmerston, will almost be completed. That is a great achievement, and I am looking forward to the wonderful things that this is going to provide us in terms of developing north Australia.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is interesting listening to the contribution by the member for Solomon, the very strong Tony Abbott supporter who must be licking her wounds, feeling very sorry for herself and working out how she can possibly survive under the current regime.

The Turnbull government has failed to deliver its second-rate broadband on time and within budget. The rollout of the Turnbull government's fibre to the node and copper to the home is much slower than we were promised, and it has had a number of problems. There is not enough information going out to people in areas where the NBN will be rolled out, and there is very little understanding within the community in relation to the NBN.

I am one of the very fortunate members of parliament, in that the NBN is being rolled out within the Shortland electorate. One of the first places that fibre-to-the-node and copper from the node to the home was turned on was Belmont. My office is there and numerous workers on the rollout came over and told me about the problems that they were having with the copper wires. It was supposed to be turned on in July and it was finally turned on on 21 September. On 22 September, the shadow minister for communications visited the Shortland electorate and we had a number of forums. Overwhelmingly, within the area where it had been rolled out, there was lack of understanding and lack of knowledge. People did not know what it meant. I have to say that the government has done a very, very poor job of informing people, a very, very poor job of delivering on time and a very, very poor job of keeping within budget.

The cost has blown out. We were promised a second-rate NBN for a price of $29.5 billion and now the cost has escalated to $56 billion. What is the explanation? I do not believe there has been a satisfactory explanation delivered to the people of Australia on this enormous cost blow-out. All we have is rhetoric; all we have is a second-rate broadband that is not delivering what it was promised to do. We are having a broadband rolled out that is going to be obsolete by the time it is finished being rolled out across Australia, and that is not cost-effective.

In the Shortland electorate, the residents of Swansea have the worst access to broadband, where broadband is available, in Australia. I know members of the House will be very surprised to learn that the one area that is missing on all the rollout plans is Swansea. People cannot access ports on the ADSL, because there are none available, and the NBN is something that exists in the ether. It is not good enough. I mentioned it to the Prime Minister when he was shadow minister and his answer was, 'They'll get it eventually.'

One of my constituents sent me an email after he read an article in The Australian. He said:

The FTTN—

that is, fibre-to-the node—

trials had delivered ... speeds of 100Mbps & upload speeds of 40Mbps.

But that is if you are really close. He will be more than 700 metres away. He said:

For the remaining 10% download speeds could fall to 25Mbps.

So it is delivering a second-rate service to these people. The nbn co is conducting a promotion in the Shorthand electorate this week. They doing it at Charlestown in the electorate, which is an area where construction of the NBN starts at the end of 2016. That is not good enough. There is no understanding of the area and people are not being delivered what they were promised would be delivered by the Turnbull government. (Time expired)

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am absolutely astounded that anyone from the Labor Party could come into this place and be critical of the job that this government is doing with the rollout of the NBN. I believe that members of the Labor Party, particularly those who were here in 2008, should still hang their heads in shame. I sat in this place in 2008 and watched the Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund being raided and rolled into $900 cash payments that disappeared in wrapping paper and plastic toys leading up to Christmas in 2008. The government inherited an NBN program that was, I believe, instigated on the back of a beer coaster in an aeroplane with the previous minister and the Prime Minister. I believe the initial rollout was represented by that amount of planning.

I agree that Australia does need a national broadband network. It is important and no more important than in the electorate of Parkes. I represent a third of New South Wales—256,000 square kilometres—and some of the largest agribusinesses in Australia. Many of those businesses and individuals are absolutely frustrated beyond belief in trying to deal with the interim satellite. It is one of the worst examples of public policy that we have seen. The previous government had no cap on some of the products that could be sold from that. It was oversubscribed and we ended up with slow speeds that jammed. Indeed, the previous minister had to take some of the plans back so that everyone could get a go. Great news: last Monday, the new satellite—the first of the two Ka-band satellites—went up. They will certainly give the people of the bush an internet service that they can use.

One of the other things that is important to know is that, in the six years of the Labor government, not one cent, not one brass razoo, went into mobile phone black spots. In the bush, internet is largely delivered through the phone network. As I speak, they are harvesting crops of barley right across the Parkes electorate. If your grain harvester breaks down and the servicemen come to plug in their laptop to do a diagnosis, if they do not have mobile phone coverage they cannot do the job properly. So I very much welcome the black spot program rolled out by this government, and I look forward to the next rollouts. Indeed, one of the agreements that Prime Minister Turnbull came to with Warren Truss, prior to forming his ministry, was that we would continue rolling out the black spot program until there was no need to do so.

As we speak, we now have the Downer company rolling out the NBN in Dubbo. It is due for completion in May next year. Last week I was very pleased to visit Westhaven, which is a supported accommodation facility in Dubbo. The people in Westhaven were making the identifier tags for the cables that are going through Dubbo. They are indeed doing a fantastic job. I hope that, beyond Dubbo, the NBN Co and Downer actually give Westhaven more work to do as the NBN gets rolled out across the state.

To give people a bit of an idea what I am talking about, at the change of government I had a meeting with representatives from the NBN Co and I asked, 'Just out of interest, when will my home town of Warialda get broadband?' The answer: 2024! I can tell you now that most of my electorate is on track to be rolled out in the announcements in 2017. So we have come forward seven years. We are back on budget, we are back on track and we are very quickly fixing up the mess left to us by the previous government.

Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in respect of this motion, which relates to the National Broadband Network, or what would have been a national broadband network, had Labor still been in government, but what is now indeed a very second-rate network. In November 2013, the rollout of fibre to 54,000 homes and businesses was to have commenced in my electorate of Griffith. I say 'was to' as it did not commence, because the new government at the time decided against rolling out fibre to my electorate of Griffith. In fact, my electorate is not even on the rollout plan, even for this second-rate version of an NBN. It is ridiculous.

When you think about the mess that has been made of the National Broadband Network under the now Prime Minister, who has been the communications minister for the duration of this government, it is really obvious to see some of the problems and flaws we have had to put up with as a nation. When you think about the decision to move away from fibre to this multi-technology mix idea, including in some cases copper, as we have learnt from the NBN Co's speech to the National Press Club recently, this idea that we are going to replace some copper with copper is absolutely ridiculous. Fancy trying to introduce 1940s technology in the 21st century. The multi-technology mix includes copper but will also rely on HFC cable and ADSL to deliver broadband. At the moment ADSL is used mostly across my electorate, but we have some HFC cable, which I want to talk about. This is absolutely inadequate for the needs of the 21st century.

We all know that there is a communications revolution underway, the likes of which the world has never seen. We all know that a vastly increasing and sharply increasing quantity of data is being transmitted across the internet every day. If you look at some of the projections from Cisco you can see just how sharply that is projected to increase. Yet we are going to be getting only 25 megabits per second under this second-rate NBN. That was to have been delivered by the end of 2016, but it is not even going to be delivered by the end of 2016—that second-rate, 25 megabits per second NBN.

I met with the then communications minister to ask him why we are not getting appropriate rollout of NBN in my electorate of Griffith and he was unable even to tell me how many homes and businesses have connections to HFC cable. But even those who do report to me that they have some difficulties using that HFC connection. So we can talk about the second-rate nature of the NBN and we can talk about the cost blowout. We were told it was going to be $29.5 billion to build the coalition's NBN. It has now blown out to $56 billion. Up to $56 billion from $29.5 billion. We can talk about the fact that the technology is second-rate and that our competitors in places like South Korea will get vastly faster internet speeds than us, and are already getting vastly faster internet speeds than us. We can also talk about the fact that my electorate is not on the rollout plan. But I also wanted to mention some of the actual stories I am hearing about the effects on homes and businesses in my electorate of not having super-fast broadband. Some of the residents have undertaken a survey I have sent out about broadband access in my electorate. This is what some people have had to say in respect of HFC connection.

Liam of Camp Hill says, 'It is too slow and drops out all the time. Our household is two adults and four children, including two high-school students. I do some work from home. There are frequent times when the speed is slow. It is unworkable. This inhibits both my work and my children's school requirements. There is certainly not enough bandwidth for entertainment—Spotify et cetera, Netflix and YouTube—on top of school and work. I have the opportunity for video calls to attend work meetings. The internet connection is too unreliable for me to do so, and as such to not take advantage of the opportunity to work from home, which is particularly annoying with family commitments.' That is one example.

Robert from Camp Hill says, 'Horrible. I have been released from my contract and will be upgrading my connection by downgrading to ADSL, which, ironically, has faster speeds, because it is not overcrowded.'

Daniel of Morningside says, 'No, it does not meet the needs of my household, since the upload speed is so poor. Also, there are three adults living in our house, each with their own computer on the local area network and their phone, which connect via the wireless. If everyone wants to use the internet at the same time it is ultra-slow. We also have a child living in our house, which means that in the future it will only get worse, when he is old enough to use the internet.'

This is why we need Griffith put back onto the NBN. These are just a few of the people who have responded to my survey to tell me about the slow internet speeds in my electorate and the effect it is having on their household.

Debate adjourned.