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

Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, at the beginning of my contribution I would like to wish you all the best for the future. I would like to reinforce the remarks made by the member for Reid. I have enjoyed working with you over the time. I have been on committees with you, and I see you as a fine parliamentarian and somebody that our national parliament can be proud of.

Today I would like to raise the concerns of one of my constituents, a woman who lives in Charlestown and is a detective at Charlestown police station. She moved into a new estate earlier this year and she has been trying to access broadband service to her new home in this new subdivision. Charlestown exchange has apparently reached its capacity and Telstra will not commit to the money needed to put infrastructure in place to allow new residents to go on to broadband, and the dial-up in the area is getting very slow. Residents have been told that they need another 80 requests before they can commit to the upgrade. But Telstra does not keep a waiting list, so if a new applicant rings in today and there just happens to be capacity, that person immediately accesses the service. I hardly think that is a fair way to approach this issue.

I wrote to the minister in April this year and I received a response from her at the beginning of September. In that letter she pointed out that it is an open, competitive market and that there were options that my constituent could look at. Basically she said it was bad luck—to be quite honest. When my constituent received this letter she contacted my office. She was very upset. The minister did mention the government’s new initiative in relation to high-speed broadband. I might note that it is WiMAX that will service this very heavily populated area of my electorate. It is a second-class type of broadband. My constituent was not at all happy. My office is asking Telstra to review their decision. We are also looking at the Australian broadband guarantee that the minister referred to in her letter. But it is a far cry from what Labor is promising the people of Australia: broadband at a fast speed to 98 per cent of all houses. It will be cheap, fast internet access, which is something that the government has failed to commit to people such as my constituent in Charlestown, who is very upset with the government. (Time expired)