Cathy O'Toole (Herbert, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Turnbull government has made a complete mess of the NBN in my electorate. In fact, where I come from, we talk about the 'no broadband neighbours', because that's exactly what is happening in Townsville. In my electorate it is quite common to have one side of the street able to access the NBN and the other side not. Townsville is full of no-broadband neighbours. No-broadband neighbours are homes that have been declared to be service class 0, meaning that NBN Co has made an operational decision that it would be too resource intensive or too time consuming to connect them. These premises are simply left behind until the NBN moves on to the next area.

In my electorate, small business operator and director of 2Technical, Luke Cashion-Lozell, has been toing and froing with stakeholders and NBN Co for some time. The NBN has been connected to Luke's office since March but, even though Luke has a notice of completion from NBN Co and 80 per cent of the tenants in his building are connected to the NBN, it appears he is not actually connected. He has reached out to multiple retail service providers, who did not help. He has reached out to NBN Co, who did not help. He has reached out to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, who also did not help. Luke sent me an email in which he wrote: 'I find it horrifying that NBN Co are able to operate like they're seemingly ungoverned by anyone, completely outside of the purview of the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.' I agree, Luke: this is horrifying.