Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion moved by the member for Banks. It is great to see so many people here still and to hear those who have spoken passionately about this issue. They have their views, and then there are the facts, so I will try to enlighten the members who are still here about the particular issues faced in my electorate of Swan.

The member moving the motion talks about problems with the NBN around the country, but I would put forward today the proposition that nowhere—nowhere—has the rollout been so shambolic, so mismanaged by Labor, so disappointing as in my home state of Western Australia. The reason I am talking on this, and have spoken previously in parliament about this issue many times, is the fact that in my electorate of Swan the previous Labor government decided to promise at the 2010 election to roll out the NBN and to start that in June 2011. They did not get around to starting it until about October 2012, as two years later there were no ready-for-service premises in these areas.

There were, however, dozens of newspaper articles, press releases and media appearances by the Labor Party, and I have some of them here showing the Labor Party at all of their ceremonies. There were maps, there were button-pushing ceremonies announcing the NBN was here and was available; in my electorate of Swan the Labor Party even promoted a forum on Labor's NBN on the basis that it was 'delivering fast, affordable and reliable broadband free of charge'. The problem was that on election day 2013 there were only 34 premises in the whole of Perth connected. How good was that? What a rollout! For all the button-pushing events, all the announcements that it was turned on, all the press releases, all the photos with councillors behinds trucks, all the wearing of hard hats and hi-vis vests—and there were only 34 connected in the whole of Perth. It was a shocking record and exposed the true state of the NBN in Western Australia under the Labor government—an absolute shambles.

The shambles was exposed in many areas but was perhaps summed up by the fact that the lead contractor in Western Australia, Syntheo, which had struggled to deliver anything much, announced that it would pull out of state and no longer continue with the project in WA. In August 2013 it was announced that the Syntheo joint venture and NBN Co had decided not to renew contracts in Western Australia in South Australia—I see the member for Grey here and he knows about this—after their expiration in September 2013 and November 2013. On August 13, 2013, The Australian featured an article, entitled 'The never-ending NBN rollout', which detailed how:

… days after Syntheo said it was walking away from the NBN … as many as seven subcontracting companies in SA also had pulled out of the project, complaining they were owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid fees.

Difficulties with Syntheo and delays in progress as a result were not a new problem for NBN Co. The article pointed out that in March 2013 the company had admitted:

… labour problems in the Northern Territory and a lack of specialist fibre-splicers had hit the rollout with a three-month delay.

Those problems got so bad the NBN Co had to revoke Syntheo's contract to build the fibre network in the Territory.

But if you listen to those on the other side, this is an excellent rollout. They are saying what a fantastic rollout it is.

In his motion that we are debating, the member says that the NBN was badly mismanaged by the previous government. The minister has said on many occasions that the lack of any rigorous study or cost-benefit analysis was detrimental to the project. I think this mismanagement and lack of planning and analysis came together in Teague Street in my electorate of Swan, one of the areas where construction did actually start in Western Australia. There were two issues in Teague Street that I was contacted about by my constituents. They initially contacted my office about the damage being done to streetscapes. One constituent kept count of the number of times the street had been dug up and reconcreted—again and again and again.

More worrying was the incident involving asbestos at the site. I spoke about this during the last parliament and I will not repeat it in full today as members can refer to that speech and I am sure they will be rushing out to do that. But I will repeat that the highest priority must be the safety of the workers and the communities where this work is taking place. It sounds a bit like the pink batts incident, doesn't it? We can have all the rhetoric about who is right and who is wrong but, at the end of the day, major infrastructure projects must protect the workers and the people in the communities who could be affected by such things as asbestos fibres.

In conclusion, I support the motion moved by the member for Banks. I am confident that the minister will be able to turn this sorry debacle around and ensure fast broadband is delivered to Western Australia and my electorate of Swan.

Debate adjourned.

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