Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When Labor initiated the NBN almost a decade ago, I think I would have been considered an early adopter. I could see the benefits for an outer-metropolitan and semi-rural area of high-speed broadband. I was also frustrated, as a small-business owner, by poor quality ADSL from my mountains home, and almost non-existent mobile, and had many conversations with other small-business operators about the need for a reliable, faster internet connection. At the time, I thought NBN would deliver. The statement of expectations set out by Labor required the company to make the NBN accessible to all Australians. That is happening and will continue to happen. This bill does provide certainty that from 2021 it will continue as was always the intention, although I believe the change in the mix of service has been incredibly detrimental to the integrity of the network. It has, quite frankly, created inequality across my electorate of Macquarie.

Let's go back and think of where we were in 2009. After more than a decade John Howard had ensured that Australia was in the broadband backwater. It was Labor that carved out the principle that every Australian should have access to modern communications infrastructure. It took those opposite many years to come to the party and sign up to this principle. In the end they had no choice because, in spite of the irresponsible claims that no-one needed fast upload and download times, businesses, students and families all realised that in fact they did. Labor is proud of having fought for and reached this point.

Labor supports the regime as outlined in schedule 3 of the bill. The Statutory Infrastructure Provider regime will offer a natural extension of the current arrangements—the certainty that, as we move beyond the initial NBN rollout, every Australian home and small business will continue to get access to high-speed broadband connection. It is fundamentally about equality of opportunity, and it will ensure that Australians can access high-speed broadband irrespective of where they live and work. But—and there is a but—there is so much more to do to make this NBN work the way it's intended.

I'd like to talk about some of the local issues we face in Macquarie. The plan of works yet to be rolled out offers no equity for people in my electorate. For a start, my electorate has five different types of broadband. There is fibre to the premises, top of the line thanks to Labor, through the suburbs around Windsor and Richmond. Fibre to the node through my upper Blue Mountains towns, from Mount Victoria to Lawson, demonstrated that this has been a very poor substitute for quality, and, unbelievably, we have more FTTN to come. We have the Sky Muster satellite, we have fixed wireless—also an incredibly disappointing technology not just for the fact that it requires giant towers across rural landscapes—and shortly there will be fibre to the curb. All of them have their challenges, but I would much prefer to be dealing with some dug-up clumps of grass than the service-zero issues we're seeing with the FTTN rollout in the upper Blue Mountains.

Last year retail service providers were called out for selling speed plans that the copper NBN couldn't deliver. And my constituents fell victim to those. Nearly one in two customers on the copper NBN who were paying for the top tier speeds had their speeds downgraded and were compensated as a result. It was later reported that one in three homes on copper can't achieve 50 megabits per second, and three out of four can't achieve 100 megabits per second. The Senate also learnt that no funding was set aside in the government's NBN business case out to 2040 to upgrade the copper footprint.

We have a system being rolled out that relies on copper in so much of my electorate, but it relies on the assumption that the copper connections won't need to be upgraded for at least another 23 years. That defies logic. I get reports from constituents, based on comments that technicians have made to them, about the quality of the copper right across the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury. In Bilpin, like many other upper Blue Mountains locations, the copper is old. Bilpin is geographically not far from Sydney—but it might as well be. It's got orchards and cider and is surrounded by World Heritage national park. It's subject to storms, bushfire and snow. The copper is not in great condition, and the quality of landline and ADSL is awful. There isn't a decent mobile signal in many parts of Bilpin, yet this area is only getting fixed wireless, so those landlines and that copper will still be needed, particularly in bushfires.

Residents have raised with me a number of practical issues about the rollout of fixed wireless in their area. For a start, wireless signal requires line of sight for best results, and less than 10 per cent of households in Bilpin have line of sight to the planned tower. Both trees and hills have a huge effect on the signal, and residents have pointed out that the signal only travels around 12 kilometres with direct line of sight, so many homes are out of the line, although the map that showed this on NBN's page has apparently been removed. The signal degrades and cuts out in heavy rain, and, yes, we get heavy storms in that part of the Blue Mountains.

Their other big concern—and this would be a concern to anybody who has people in bushfire areas in their electorate—is that they have no battery backup for the fixed wireless towers, so they don't work in a blackout, leaving residents with no phone line. We have the same issues with FTTN, of course, yet those residents won't even have the choice to keep their fixed landline. In Bilpin, people will have a landline that they can choose to keep, but they will continue to pay their landline rental on top of their NBN. It is hardly equitable and hardly fair, especially when you consider that Bilpin has a fibre-optic cable running from Kurrajong Heights past it, all the way to Berambing, so residents are really struggling to understand why areas not dissimilar to theirs are being gifted FTTC but they are stuck with fixed wireless.

A new resident to the Hawkesbury, Greg, who lives in Maraylya, in another part of my electorate, has been gobsmacked overall by the lack of service that he receives. Even though he's only moved 40 kilometres to the edge of Sydney, he describes the telecommunications conditions in Maraylya as Third World. What he's staggered at is that he's slated to get fixed wireless not this year, not next year, but in 2020. And that's as good as it will get under this government. His dismay is shared by a wide range of Maraylya residents. In fact, it's a total mess to try and guess what you're going to get if you live in Oakville, which has some parts FTTP, some parts fixed wireless, or McGrath's Hill, a major commercial centre that's getting FTTN, even though, next door, Windsor has FTTP. Wilberforce and Freemans Reach get stuck with FTTN. It is a complete hotchpotch in my electorate.

The choice of cheap and poor-quality technology and the lack of vision for this rollout as we're seeing it, particularly in the Hawkesbury, stand in stark contrast to other things the community sees government doing to it—for instance, the New South Wales government's obvious desire to colonise the region with dense housing developments. Let me explain. From Oakville to Grose Wold, this is a region of small communities, with paddocks and acreage where people grow vegies, keep horses and have koalas, lyrebirds and platypus in their backyards. They make a choice to move there to enjoy the peace and quiet. Most of these areas are not considered by this government's rollout to be dense enough to deserve anything other than fixed wireless, FTTN or in some cases satellite NBN. But the New South Wales government has other ideas about what will happen in the next few decades in these areas and envisages intense development. How do I know this? Why else would they be rushing through the drawing of lines on a map for two major motorways—the M9 Orbital and the Bells Line of Road? If you didn't think there were going to be changes to the area, you wouldn't need to put these on the map for times going forward. If you think this area is going to remain relatively sparsely populated, there is no need to preserve a corridor now. Hawkesbury residents will know what I mean when I say that the state Liberals have a vision of endless Redbanks west of the Hawkesbury River. I'm happy to put on the record that I am strongly opposed to that. The city should stop at the Hawkesbury River. If that is your vision, be honest about it. It's one thing to plan for future road and rail corridors but it's another to do it with absolutely zero community consultation. If that's the vision, make sure your fellow Liberal government in Canberra knows so that decent NBN can go into the region, so infrastructure can go in ahead of populations. And if you're just using it to score political points west of the ranges for your National Party colleagues, then don't. Do not treat my community, my families, my businesses, my farmers, my schools as your plaything.

An inferior NBN is symptomatic of an inconsistent vision for the Hawkesbury. On the federal government's part, it's a total lack of interest or understanding about how important and effective NBN is for this region. Quite simply, under this Prime Minister we have an NBN that is costing taxpayers $4 billion more to build than it ought. It delivers slower speeds. It is less reliable. It costs more to maintain. It is more exposed to competition from wireless. It costs more to upgrade. And it generates less revenue from those who are willing to pay. For my electorate, the slow speeds, the dropouts and the unreliable services mean that they will look to any alternative that they can find.

Trying to get issues and complaints dealt with by the NBN is as difficult as getting Donald Trump to speak in understandable sentences. They pass the buck without accountability. People make appointments with technicians only to find that no-one turns up. It's no surprise that the TIO, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, revealed a shocking increase in the number of complaints about the NBN—a 160 per cent surge in NBN complaints. I confess that many will have come from the electorate of Macquarie. For the first time, NBN complaints are growing faster than the number of new NBN services. What a damning statistic. Also for the first time, internet services have become the largest source of complaints for the TIO. All the while, the Turnbull government has been an uninterested spectator on the NBN—and this from a Prime Minister who used to have some claim to being at the front of the IT game. What a sleight of hand that was. CHOICE surveys report that 60 per cent of people on NBN had issues in the last six months; 44 per cent of these issues were related to slow speeds, 42 per cent were reported disconnections, dropouts and performance issues, and 31 per cent were problems with connections. When you look at that you know you have problems that need to be solved.

I want to finish with the issue that I started with, the issue of inequality. And I want to take a moment to talk about the impact of technology on inequality, which is actually really what I think the core of this debate is. The NBN was originally an opportunity to reduce inequality, but, the way it's going, it is failing at that. The most recent report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia takes a close look at inequality, including the future relationship between technology and inequality. The report says:

Technologies … increase the productivity of industries, groups and individuals to different extents, skewing the rewards of labour to those able to access and make use of the new technology …

This report asks:

… how do we ensure that it’s not just the well-educated, the well-connected or the wealthy that get to benefit from new technologies?

As we heard last year, the Prime Minister, with his Point Piper home, was privileged to receive a speedy connection to the NBN and is now, apparently, able to access the highest speed possible—100 megabits per second download speed and 40 megabits per second upload speed. Greg at Maraylya and my Bilpin residents can only dream about that. So let's be blunt. If you are not giving people equal access to technology, you are not giving them a chance. Sadly, as we so often see with this government, the already privileged get more privileged and the rest just get done over. What I see across Macquarie is a completely uneven, unfair and unsustainable approach.

The CEDA report also leads me to ask yet again why this government is so bent on reducing the opportunities for people to access skills through more cuts. We saw in the budget last night more cuts to TAFE, to the tune of $270 million. Why are so many impediments put in the way of people who want to go to university? Why are limits put on universities' ability to offer new and innovative courses that give people the chance to explore new technologies, all because of funding cuts? It shows the folly of this government's intent to cut funding to schools, of which 82 per cent of the brunt will be felt by public schools. As CEDA says, the challenge is to ensure that no-one is unfairly excluded or discriminated against along the way. But that's what we're seeing with the NBN.

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