Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A recent analysis of the Abbott government's performance undertaken by the Australian Financial Review confirmed what we all suspected: this government has broken more promises than it has kept. The principles of honour, trust and keeping your word seem to mean very little to our Prime Minister and to many of his ministers.

Today, I would like to talk about just one of the most serious broken promises for the people of Tasmania—the Liberals pre-election promise to deliver full-fibre NBN. Tasmania is not like the rest of Australia. Our small population and geographic isolation are wonderful assets that support our clean, pristine environment and our incredible way of life. But they both pose challenges for economic growth and can impact on the services that can be delivered viably.

Labor's NBN offered Tasmanian businesses a real opportunity to bridge this tyranny of distance. It promised to create a real point of difference that would encourage investment in the state and see more jobs created. The NBN brought with it the tantalising possibility that Tasmania could stake out a profitable space for itself in the rapidly-growing digital economy. Under Labor, Tasmania was first cab off the rank for the NBN rollout. Under Labor, Tasmania had the fastest NBN rollout in the country. And under Labor, Tasmania was set to be the first state in the nation to be fully connected to the NBN, with the rollout to around 208,000 homes and businesses scheduled for completion by the end of 2015.

Before the election, the Liberals tried to convince Tasmanians that they were on a unity ticket with Labor on the NBN. Again and again, we heard that the Liberals would honour all Tasmanian NBN contracts, which of course included the master contract for the full-fibre rollout. Minister for Communications, Mr Turnbull, confirmed this on 16 August last year when he said:

This is not just a commitment to honour contracts where construction is under way, but all contracts which have been entered into.

He reiterated this by saying:

We intend to honour existing contracts. The alternative would be to breach them and that is a course we would not countenance.

Liberal Senator David Bushby, on behalf of the federal Liberal team, also went on the record the next day, saying:

We understand that those contracts are in place to roll out right across the state, and if that is the case, we will honour that.

Let us be clear. There was no wriggle room in these statements. Tasmanians were promised the full-fibre NBN as it was contracted by the previous government. The Liberals also told us that under their government the NBN would be delivered 'sooner'. Mr Turnbull proudly touted his plan, saying:

…every household and business to have access to broadband with a download data rate of between 25 and 100 megabits per second by late 2016.

Tasmanians understandably took Mr Turnbull and the Liberals on their word, and I have no doubt this played into their decisions on voting day.

In September 2013 we had a change of government. Since then, the Liberals' earnest promises have disintegrated into thin air, and Tasmania's NBN rollout has ground to a sickening halt. Mr Turnbull tried to pretend that everything was okay in February by assuring Tasmanians that our NBN rollout was 'back on track'.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth. NBN Co's own data on the rollout tells the real story. At the end of first week of May this year, this summary showed that NBN cabling went past 38,338 premises in Tasmania. At the end of the first week of November, just 38,345 premises had been passed. Yes, that is right. A full six months later and the government only managed to extend Tasmania's NBN footprint by seven properties. Seven!

The hard reality is that the NBN rollout in Tasmania has ground to a screeching halt. Not only that, but promises to deliver Labor's superior, contracted full-fibre solution have also fallen by the wayside, just like so many pre-election promises of this government. Great swathes of the state were removed from NBN's rollout maps overnight, including around 40,000 premises that had rock-solid construction contracts in place.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How many?

Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, Senator Bilyk, 40,000 premises. Nowhere is there greater uncertainty than in my local community on the north-west coast of Tasmania. Under Labor, NBN work was scheduled to start in Devonport in December last year, with Ulverstone following in February this year and Burnie next month. Under the Liberals these three areas, which are among Tasmania's largest, have dropped off NBN maps entirely—they just disappeared—leaving locals in NBN limbo, unsure what type of broadband they will end up with and when it will finally be delivered. It is no secret that we have some challenges to face in the north-west, but Labor's NBN gave the community real hope that we could stake out our place in the digital economy. This vital digital infrastructure would drive investment that would, in turn, create the needed jobs—something that we desperately need in north-west Tasmania.

People were starting to fear that the people of the north-west would be unable to offer business or families the infrastructure that is becoming an increasingly important part of modern life. No-one in the government is willing to give timetables, and the promises before the election to honour all Tasmanian contracts vanished in a puff of hot air. Last week, however, it looked like the north-west and, indeed, the whole state might finally get a reprieve and the wheels of the Tasmanian NBN rollout might finally start turning again after more than a year of government inaction.

The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was due to visit Devonport for an NBN forum, and he did come. The hope was that he would lay out a plan to finally deliver on his election promise of rolling out full-fibre NBN to our state and to our local community. The local member, Brett Whiteley, went on the record saying that the government needed to do 'much more' on the NBN—so their own members are saying they need to do much more—and that added to the feeling that some good news might be around the corner and that it might be delivered on that day. If the community approached this forum with high hopes, it did not take long to dash them entirely as the minister outlined that the north-west would not get the full-fibre NBN that was promised prior to the last election. He could not even tell us when the rollout would actually start. So people who came along to that forum were not given any commitment about when it would occur—again, broken promises. He confirmed the north-west would be cast away to the digital dark lands, doomed to get a substandard offering delivered up to four years late, with no start date in sight.

Tasmania's north-west NBN was being trashed before our eyes, just like the words spoken by the Liberals before the election. This is an absolute betrayal of the people of the north-west coast and it is, quite simply, reprehensible. Just as the Liberals are determined to create a nation of haves and have-nots with their cruel budget measures, so they plan to split our state into a division of digital haves and have-nots. On one side are the haves that will receive Labor's high-quality, world-class, full-fibre broadband. Those people will see their property prices grow, their leisure options increase and their ability to participate in the digital economy expand. On the other side will be many thousands of Tasmanians who are the digital have-nots. Those people, including those in my community, are being offered a cobbled together solution of fibre and ageing, disintegrating copper wires. They will see lower property prices and investors more likely to bypass their area in favour of the digitally superior alternatives. And then, when the decades-old copper wires finally give up, the whole thing will have to be done all over again.

Promising people high-speed, full-fibre internet before the election and delivering a substandard solution afterwards shows pure contempt for the Tasmanian people, not to mention the very serious erosion of trust in our democratic processes. Let's do this once and let's do it properly. Let's not shackle future government with the cost of cleaning up a substandard copper-hybrid mess. And let's invest to secure Tasmania's place in the digital economy of the future. Tasmanians do not deserve to be treated so shabbily; they do deserve the full-fibre NBN that they were promised by the Liberal Party prior to the last election. We call on them to deliver that and deliver it now.