Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity in the adjournment debate tonight to update the House on the issue of the National Broadband Network in my region. As I have spoken previously about it, I wanted to give an update to the House and also acknowledge that my colleague the member for Throsby has also contributed to this debate in the House this week, something that has taken up a fair amount of the attention of the House. In the debate today the member for Wentworth raised the question of what exactly the problem was. I draw his attention to a two-page special in the Illawarra Mercury on Saturday that talked about the National Broadband Network and in particular highlighted how there is a significant problem for suburbs across our region where the existing infrastructure is failing to provide the sort of broadband that a modern economy in a region like ours needs.

The former member for Throsby and I asked the Illawarra branch of Regional Development Australia to undertake a strategic positioning paper for our RDA area on the potential of the National Broadband Network to facilitate economic growth and development. They did that through a subcommittee of RDA headed up by Mr Geoff McQueen, who is a prominent and very successful internet entrepreneur in the Illawarra region. They identified that there are significant suburbs—for example, around the area of Figtree—where the old copper network is incapable, without significant upgrading, of providing ADSL broadband services. For a significant number of years now I have been dealing with constituents ringing me expressing frustration with that.

It is also important to acknowledge that, although many of the northern suburbs in our region that cling to the escarpment overlooking the sea are beautiful places to live, they are not in particularly friendly topography if your only option is wireless broadband. So we have many people in those suburbs who cannot get ADSL because of the failure to upgrade the connections and cannot get wireless either, or if they do get wireless it is particularly unreliable. During this debate about the National Broadband Network, it is certainly something that has been raised with me regularly and people are actually particularly supportive of the rollout of fibre to the home.

The Illawarra Mercury article, written by local journalist Matthew Jones, also highlighted a case that had come to my attention. I will just read Matthew’s report:

It’s 9am, and Coalcliff’s Ben Rennie is waiting to hook up to a video conference call with a business client in New York.

Along with partners in Melbourne, Perth and Bondi, Mr Rennie connects, but soon there is a hitch—a one-gigabyte digital presentation hasn’t arrived in the client’s inbox, and the whole call is relying on it.

Half an hour of wasted time later, the presentation has arrived, but Mr Rennie has disappeared from the call as his internet connection has dropped out. What should have been a productive business meeting quickly became an exercise in frustration.

The culprit? Slow and unreliable broadband.

Mr Rennie is a director and co-founder of strategic consultancy firm 6.2 and believes he’s a perfect example of how the high-speed National Broadband Network could change the way our region does business.

Made up of 12 consultants, 6.2 is one of a new breed of businesses that live “in the cloud”, with much of their important data stored offsite and only accessible via the web.

That means the internet is more than just a useful tool, Mr Rennie says. “It means if I’ve got downtime, or the connection’s slow, it just makes us inefficient. When you’re living on the cloud, so to speak, you can’t just pop your head around the corner and say, ‘hey, are you there, bro?’ and have a quick chat,” he said.

The Federal Government is hoping the NBN will be the cure for such cyberspace ills.

This exactly highlights the potential of a fibre-to-the-home broadband network to revolutionise the way that people work. Here is a gentleman running an international business from home. I am particularly keen to see the opportunities, as the RDA is, for teleworking for the many commuters who could actually work more effectively from home in a new world where fibre is provided and, importantly for these businesses and home based work, not only download but also upload speeds are significantly improved. I think it is time the debate moved on on the issue. (Time expired)