Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

when Telstra in the past has basically not met its requirements—and sought to use other methods to prevent the ACCC from doing its job in getting a fair, competitive environment—as a supplier, and as a vertically integrated company, as to other retailers in the market.

I heard the Leader of the Nationals interjecting a minute ago. It is no wonder he is concerned about this legislation. I know that his constituents want us to introduce this legislation, get it through the parliament and roll out our National Broadband Network. I will give you some examples of why that is. These examples are from just a couple of constituents in my electorate and they are the sorts of things that I regularly hear about. This is one of the major complaints I hear in my electorate office. A constituent of mine, who lives in the suburb of Redlynch in Cairns, is an IT consultant who works via the internet for clients all over the world. Six staff rely on him for their employment. Recently he bought a property at Redlynch. He did background research and made sure that broadband was available in the valley. He even talked to a couple of his immediate neighbours before committing to buy. He ordered a business broadband connection and phone line from Telstra but was later advised by Telstra that ‘it is not commercially viable to upgrade the network infrastructure at this time’. Further investigation revealed that the Redlynch exchange is full. The only option is to reapply every two weeks and hope that someone disconnects their broadband.

Telstra then offered Next G wireless broadband. The constituent’s views on Next G wireless broadband are: it is more suitable for residential low internet users, for email and occasional browsing, due to the restrictive bandwidth and download limits—the constituent is a businessman who wants to do business from home, as many people do, and there are people in the southern suburbs of Cairns with similar stories—and it will not support a continuous internet connection for the use of international voice over IP, teleconferencing or the remote management of computers on the other side of the world due to the way it regularly drops and re-establishes the line. The constituent lives in Cairns and wants to participate in the world economy; he wants to drive productivity and create jobs in the economy of Cairns. He said, ‘At its best, this significantly inferior service will cost me seven times what I was paying for my internet connection in Edge Hill’—another suburb of Cairns—‘and, at worst, 30 times more per month.’ That amounts to $1,500 as opposed to $50. It is no wonder the constituent said:

Telstra has no financial incentive whatsoever to improve the wired infrastructure of its exchanges even in urban areas whilst it can happily sell a wireless solution for the sort of additional margins we are talking about.

To know that my neighbour next door and his kids enjoy the sort of broadband I require for less than $100 a month, and yet I am being asked to pay more than ten times that makes me feel completely ripped off and abused. This is an abuse of the monopoly position Telstra have up in Cairns as a provider of both the landline and wireless infrastructures. Basically, with Next G, the government has been blind-sided by Telstra.

This is the OPEL plan that they were talking about rolling out—a similar network. Telstra has a network like this, but it is overcharging and it does not deliver the service that small business wants in places like Redlynch, the southern suburbs and the northern beaches of Cairns.

Residents in the northern beaches have raised similar concerns. The Smithfield exchange is oversubscribed and you have to get ADSL2. ADSL1 tends to run at dial-up speeds. People are upset out there in the community. I am looking forward to talking to them about the opposition’s position on this bill. I am sure that many members here will be going back to their electorates and talking about the opposition opposing our rollout of nation-building infrastructure, the National Broadband Network and the need for us to introduce regulatory reforms that ensure that retailers in the telecommunications area can have access at a fair price to those wholesale services. This is about regulatory reform, but it is also about ensuring that our National Broadband Network is rolled out effectively. It is good for the Australian people, it is good for the Australian economy, it will drive productivity into the 21st century and it is something that I strongly support and look forward to advocating in my local community.

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