Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Innovation) 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 O'Neill today relating to the National Broadband Network.

Since our return this year, we've had Senator Fifield coming into the chamber and rabbiting on about the great success of his NBN rollout. However, we need to let him in on the secret that the rest of Australia knows: what a dog he's rolling out. It's a lemon. It was only supposed to cost $29 billion—that's what they said. They said that the market would come in and put in any additional funds that were required to finish the job. Instead of that happening, because what they'd rolled out was so bad the government couldn't get people to invest, they've had to tip in another $20 billion themselves. So now, at a cost of $49 billion, we've got a copper-loaded lemon distributed across the country.

And this morning the government's second-rate NBN took another hit. The NBN CEO, Mr Morrow, has been quoted overnight as saying that already he's considering building a 5G wireless network to bypass the copper NBN, the one that this minister keeps coming in and telling us is really good, bragging about his numbers—except that, every time he says another 10,000, another 15,000, another 20,000 Australians have had the Malcolm Turnbull model of the NBN inflicted on them, I feel the pain and suffering of our local communities, all of those people out there who have had a terrible time managing their connection to the NBN, and all of those businesses. Let me just say that 83 per cent—not a small number—of small businesses say they lack confidence in the government's NBN delivery. Now that's got to be a fail by any measure, yet this minister, this senator, keeps coming in and telling us what a great job he's doing. The gap between reality and Mr Fifield's version of it is absolutely unfathomable. I cannot understand why he doesn't understand the Australian people's concerns about this copper based technology he is rolling out.

The reason that we had Mr Morrow say that he's going to have to go to 5G is that he knows what the government has been trying to deny for a long time—that parts of the Malcolm Turnbull version of this NBN are unreliable and corroding. There are thousands of Australians out there who have what the NBN euphemistically call 'service class 0'. That means they don't know when they're going to get to you, because they've got big problems. And why have they got big problems? Because they're trying to force information down a copper line that's landing at a node at the speed of light. They're trying to splice together 21st-century technology with a technology that should have been left in the last century, and, where those two things meet, it's not working out. Mr Morrow even knows it. He's saying: 'It's failing. We might have to go to 5G.' But this minister didn't want to answer those questions; he doesn't understand the dog that he is inflicting on the Australian people.

Today we've seen Senator Fifield failing once again to take responsibility for the mess that's been created by this Turnbull government, and, by doing so, he is absolutely failing to understand or recognise the real impacts that this mess is having on ordinary Australian men and women and the businesses right across this country. Every single member and senator who is in this place will have had hundreds and hundreds of Australians contact them in their offices and say: 'Please help me out. I'm about to lose my absolute patience with the NBN. I cannot survive this any longer.' We had evidence given to the NBN committee on the Central Coast of New South Wales of one gentleman at Masters Beach who lost in the order of $70,000 from his business in the lead-up to Christmas because this government just doesn't get it. It just doesn't understand, and it continues to deny the reality that businesses right across this country are being compromised in their capacity to compete in a global market. They're being compromised by constant dropouts. They're being compromised by slow speeds because the technology that this government's inflicted on them won't deliver what they need to do business in the 21st century.

Australians are concerned about the costs, and our government should also be concerned about the costs to maintain an old copper technology that is redundant. We know that our company, NBN, is an Australian company—it belongs to all of us. And yet, under the custodianship of this government, it has failed to deliver us the technology we need for the 21st century. They can call it Malcolm Turnbull's multi-technology mix, but we know it's Malcolm Turnbull's mess.