Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is unacceptable that in the year 2006, many residents and businesses in the Throsby electorate are still unable to access high-speed ADSL broadband services. The Howard government has been so obsessed with forcing through the privatisation of Telstra, against the wishes of the vast majority of Australians, that it has completely neglected the telecommunications needs of our community.

I would like to put on the parliamentary record a few examples of the complaints that have come across my desk in recent times. The Harvey World Travel agency located in the Shellharbour City Centre business district have been plagued by the lack of ADSL connection since May 2005. The owner and his staff are attempting to run a heavily computer-dependent business using dial-up facilities. Access to ADSL broadband is central to the core productivity of the business. I understand that the agency will have their request met shortly and not before time. A wait of over a year is not acceptable.

The same frustration was expressed to me by the owner of a recently opened telecommunications business in the Albion Park Industrial Estate. Surely Telstra could have anticipated in their forward planning that high-speed broadband would be needed in an industrial estate. A constituent from Yellow Rock wrote recently in frustration with a simple message to the government. I quote from his email:

Despite indications from the Prime Minister that Telstra is providing improved services to the people in the ‘bush’, I find that I am less than four kilometres cable-end to cable-end from the new exchange, yet you cannot supply me with ADSL.

Is it possible in this day and age, and contrary to what the Prime Minister has said, that Telstra ran a small paired cable up this road, with the intention of reinstalling multiplexed services all the way up the hill? This would preclude everyone in Yellow Rock from access to ADSL, as ADSL cannot cope with multiplexes, or RIMs. Are we in Yellow Rock victims of discrimination? This can only be seen as total arrogance for the plight of people in the bush.

Another constituent wrote to me saying that he had moved to a housing estate in the suburb of Horsley in January this year. The estate was built around 1999, but he cannot get an ADSL connection. He points out, ‘As a science teacher, connection to the internet is almost mandatory.’ Dial-up services are totally inadequate for the needs of his profession. He is using Telstra’s wireless broadband but at a much greater cost to the family than ADSL unlimited access. He argues that wireless broadband services should be provided at more competitive rates. He says: ‘It’s Telstra’s problem not the problem of those who have been given a technologically “second rate” telephone network.’ He is right.

Telstra’s recent decision to shelve its fibre network proposal is a major blow for consumers and our economy. Telstra management at the highest level is hiding behind its dispute with the regulator and using that as the reason for not expanding ADSL services, and this government continues to pay lip-service to the problems people are experiencing. The end result is that many people and businesses in my electorate of Throsby have been left on an IT goat track instead of being part of an information superhighway.

Australia is falling behind other developed nations on both internet speed and the take-up rate of broadband. Yet all the economic arguments show that the leap from dial-up to fast-speed broadband can have a huge economic impact. As the local MP in Throsby, I have pursued constituents’ concerns with Telstra local staff, but their hands are tied. I have again written to the minister asking when a community so close to the major city of Wollongong can get redress and access to high-speed broadband services.

I must say that a future Labor government will deliver a super-fast broadband network through a partnership with the telecommunications sector. So I guess that a lot of my constituents just have to live in hope, because of the failure of this government to address their needs. The fibre-to-the-node network proposal by the Labor Party will be a huge nation-building project. It will boost our economy and provide new services to Australian businesses and families—the very type of service so lacking in many parts of my electorate.