Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Communications (Senator Fifield) to a question without notice asked by Senator Bilyk today relating to the National Broadband Network.

As a matter of interest, about an hour ago a wonderful staffer from my office, Rhys, posted a speech that I gave about the NBN in this place just the other night. In the space of one hour, ladies and gentlemen, this is the sort of comment that I have had:

the nbn is a joke - took time off work to accommodate the technician who arrived then announced that there was no signal at the pole and that he would be back later in the day plus that he would call - none of which happened

Here is another comment:

Not only does it have inherent problems, but you have to sign a waiver saying that the retailer cannot be held to any guarantee of service, as it's not their fault if the infrastructure has problems.

And another:

Never able to converse with anyone at the NBN...they are scarce as hens teeth. Constantly dropping out..slower than dial up..that is if you are lucky enough to get a connection.

And this comment comes from a woman in the wonderful suburb of Kariong:

I don't know if im lucky we in Kariong will not have it for two years so I've been told.

The people who do not have the NBN that this government is rolling out are indeed lucky, because the market refused to provide additional funding to the NBN, which is the promise that this government went to the election on. The market knows what this government is trying to hide from ordinary Australians. The NBN that it is building is a lemon. The NBN taking fibre to a node and then forcing it down a copper pipe to your house is like shooting a superhighway to somewhere near you and then forcing you onto an information goat track in the last century. It simply is not working.

For those comments to arrive in the space of just an hour means there will be hundreds of them in a couple of hours. There are hundreds of people contacting my office on the Central Coast, where this live experiment in making Australians able to participate in the global economy, where they need the internet at genuinely high speeds—100 down, 25 meg up—is not being delivered. This government decided that 25 meg down and five up was going to be enough. That was never going to be enough, and the market knows it. That is why the government are ashamed and embarrassed by the fact that, while they put a $29.5 billion cap on equity, they have to go for public funding of $19.5 billion, as is declared on the Prime Minister's own website, to make sure that their dog's breakfast of an NBN goes ahead.

We should not really call it the NBN, because it is not what people were going to get. Under Labor they would have got fibre to the home, fibre to the business—fibre to give them real opportunities to change how they do business and how they use technology right across this country. I heard from a farmer who has made a half-million dollar investment in wonderful technology. His internet capacity is so poor he has a $500 debt. That is a liability that he cannot even use.

That is the kind of future that we see from this government for their NBN. It is not the NBN: it should be called what it is—Malcom Turnbull's Mess: the MTM. That is what we have: a dog's breakfast of combined different technologies. Fibre to the node—now they have figured out it is so bad that they decided they will go a little bit more fibre, so they are going to propose to bring fibre to your kerb instead of the fibre to the node. It will be a bit closer to your house, but it will still be copper from the kerb to your house, and that is where the problem is. The HFC network—at the beginning, our great innovation Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who was the Minister for Communications who made this happen, said it was going to be a fantastic thing to have HFC. He was going to use the Foxtel line into your house. They bought it, and they have not been able to use it. Millions of dollars have gone down the trap. The market knows—the market would not invest in this dodgy and disgraceful piece of infrastructure, which is selling Australia's future down the river. It is a failure at every single turn.

The number of complaints that I have received is nothing by comparison with what has been received at the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's office. Complaints about the NBN are coming through thick and fast. What are those complaints about? This is the government that promised faster, cheaper, sooner. We should have all had it by 2016—we have not got it. It was going to be cheaper—they said they could do it for $29.5 billion. Now they have had to back it up with taxpayers' money of $20 million just to keep it going. They said it was going to be faster. This is the complaint. The number of complaints of slow data speed, unusable services and dropouts has increased by 147.8 per cent nationally. That is why they could not get investors for their NBN. (Time expired)