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

Three-quarters of all fibre-to-the-node premises will not be able to reach 100 megabits per second. Over 200,000 premises on copper will not be able to receive the minimum 25 megabits per second promised by the Turnbull government. There are around 80 million hours of network downtime per year across the multitechnology mix and about $100 million has been spent purchasing almost 17,000kms of copper wire. Those are not my numbers. I haven't just made these up or plucked them out of the air. They're numbers that have been provided by the government and NBN Co. And yet despite this clear failure the Turnbull government are hell-bent on their ideological rollout of copper.

The joint standing committee gave the Turnbull government an opportunity to stop this mess—to stop the copper and to do what Australians want, and that is to take fibre to their homes. One of the first recommendations of the joint standing committee, supported by all parties on the committee, including a member of the Nationals, was for the Turnbull government to abandon the copper rollout, and, at a minimum, to take fibre to the kerb, where feasible. Instead of taking this opportunity, what did we get from the Turnbull government? A repeat of the ridiculous line that the multitechnology mix, also known throughout the company as the 'multitechnology mess', will see the rollout of fast broadband as soon as possible, at affordable prices and at least cost to taxpayers. What a ridiculous statement!

It is proven so by the statistics provided to the Senate by the government and NBN Co. The copper-reliant network is not fast—three-quarters of premises won't be able to access the very fast speeds that the NBN was designed to do. It is not more affordable for consumers than fibre; the pricing review from late last year demonstrated that. Finally, the Turnbull NBN is not the least cost to taxpayers. The Turnbull promise was the least cost to taxpayers, but blowout after blowout has seen the cost push up to around $50 billion while the internal rate of return has halved in comparison to the original fibre-to-the-premises NBN.

In Tasmania, the Turnbull government claims that the network is complete, but thousands of premises still can't get connected. No matter how many phone calls people make, and despite NBN promising the micronodes would be connected by October last year—yes, last year: 2017—it's still not finished. Worse still, for most on the north-west coast, one of the poorest parts of this country, there is no upgrade path from fibre-to-the-node to full fibre. So while the big cities of Launceston and Hobart skate ahead with gigabit connections, the north-west coast, where I live, is left behind. It is appalling conduct by this government and this Prime Minister.

On the remotest part of the north-west coast, people in the communities of Queenstown, Rosebery and Zeehan, which I have spoken about many times in this chamber, literally had to beg just for fixed-line and not to be put onto satellite. And when this government announced fibre-to-the-kerb for one million premises across the country, do you think they included Tasmania's west coast? No. At every point when I asked a question they ducked and weaved, they claimed design work had started and that it was all too late, yet construction work only started on the west coast around November last year, six months after the big one-million-homes announcement for fibre-to-the-kerb.

It's clear with this government response that this Prime Minister has taken one of the great nation-building projects of the 21st century and turned it into a complete mess. There is no plan for upgrading the inferior copper network, and I haven't even got to the appalling customer service record.

I just want to repeat four important statistics: three-quarters of all fibre-to-the-node premises will not be able to reach 100 megabits per second; over 200,000 premises on copper will not be able to receive the minimum 25 megabits per second which was promised by Prime Minister Turnbull; there are around 80 million hours of network down time per year across the multitechnology mix; and about $100 million has been spent purchasing almost 7,000 kilometre of copper wire. As I said, they're not my numbers; they're numbers that have been provided by the government and by NBN Co.

So I urge the government to listen to the joint standing committee—to listen to the people of Australia that we took evidence from all around the country when we did the inquiry—and to end the copper mess so that Australians can get on and become part of the new century.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted.