Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

Last Tuesday night I was under in Thornton, in the Hunter, at St Michael's Church Hall. There were more than 100 people there packed in like sardines. It takes a lot nowadays to get more than 100 people at a town hall meeting, particularly during the week. People are busy and they have lots of things to do. Last Tuesday night there were a lot of people who wanted to be at that church hall to talk about the NBN. There were a lot of angry people, a lot of frustrated people, and they were there because they cannot get the sort of internet speeds they want. Most cannot even get ADSL. This is the third time I have visited Thornton in the past 12 months. Last time I was there, late last year, I heard the story of a nurse who has to climb onto her roof with a toggle just to download her roster. I heard lots of stories just like this last Tuesday night. One woman was very angry because her teenage daughter needs to study at night—she is doing a course as well—and because they cannot get the internet speeds they want she has to stay at work till all hours of the night in Newcastle, sometimes getting home at 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock at night, just so both of them can study.

Another man I met was a man called Paul. He runs an accountancy business, employing seven people, 71 kilometres down the F3 in Toukley, but he lives in Thornton. He told the public meeting he would like to be able to set that business up in Thornton, but he cannot do that because he cannot get the broadband that he needs to run his business there. Another bloke, whose name I do not know, walked past when we were standing out the front before the meeting began. He said, 'What's this all about?' He did not know anything about the meeting and was not coming along to the meeting. I told him what it was about and he told a very similar story. He said that he had just moved his business from Thornton to Beresfield for the same reason: he cannot get the sort of internet services that he needs. He runs a mining services company.

The motion that we are talking about is about small business, the importance of small business and the importance for small business of broadband services, and they are just two great examples of businesses that need broadband and are not able to get those services in a town like Thornton in the Hunter. As a result of that, people move out or people move their businesses from Thornton to somewhere else.

To give you an idea of just how bad the broadband access is in Thornton, last year, Sharon Claydon, the member for Newcastle, sent out a survey to local residents. She got 177 surveys back, and of those 177 surveys, 74 per cent said they could not even get ADSL. If you look at the government's MyBroadband website you will see that it paints an even bleaker picture. The website ranks broadband quality and availability from A to E. If you put in addresses in Thornton you find that in Thornton it is E for both quality and availability. Here is the rub: before the election, Thornton was on the NBN rollout plan and was scheduled to be getting fibre to the home right now, to be rolled out over 2014, 2015 and 2016. Immediately after the election, Thornton was taken off the rollout map and it is still not on it. In December last year, the government released a new rollout plan for the next 18 months and Thornton is not on it. The motion that we are debating right now says:

… the government has a plan to prioritise getting areas of most need connected fast to reliable broadband sooner, especially in regional areas.

That is exactly what the coalition promised before the last election. In April 2013, the coalition's policy said:

Suburbs, regions, towns and business districts with the poorest services and greatest need for upgrades will receive first priority.

A couple of months later, in November 2013, at The NBN: Rebooted, Minister Turnbull, then the shadow minister, said:

In closing, let me remind you that up to two million households and businesses across Australia cannot get basic fixed-line broadband at present. Addressing these underserviced areas first is a key objective of our NBN policy.

So there is the promise and the commitment, but as you see in Thornton this is not happening; if it was happening Thornton would be getting the NBN right now. Instead, what Sharon and I saw on Tuesday night was more than a hundred very angry and very frustrated people. In two weeks time, the government has a chance to fix this. In two weeks time, the 18 month rollout plan is due to be updated. It is a chance for the government to fix this and finally to put Thornton on the rollout map. I urge the government and the minister to do this not just for Thornton but for all the places across the country with terrible access to broadband, all the places that the government promised would get the NBN first.

When Whitlam died last year, I asked my parents what the one thing was that they most remembered him for. It was not Medibank, universal access to healthcare services or the changes to universities; it was sewerage that they remembered him for. I grew up in an area in Western Sydney where it changed people's lives. People may think their response surprising, but if you ever had to go out into the backyard to go to the toilet in the middle of the night in winter, you would know how important having a flushable toilet in the house is.

When Whitlam started talking about this in the sixties, he was sneered at. People thought that it was not the role of the federal government to provide this sort of essential infrastructure. It is not sneered at anymore. Twenty years ago, when Paul Keating launched Networking Australia's future, he said:

… national information infrastructure will be no less a general right than access to water … or electricity.

Just like Whitlam 20 years before him, there were people who were sneering at what he was saying back then in 1995. But history has proven Keating right. Just like clean water out of the tap, power at the flick of a switch or a flushable toilet inside the house, people expect fast and reliable broadband at the click of a button. When they cannot get it, as in Thornton where 74 per cent of people cannot get access to ADSL, they are justifiably very angry.

The government needs to think hard about this. One of the reasons that people are so upset with this government is broken promises. People can rattle off that favoured famous quote from Tony Abbott the night before the election:

… no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions … and no cuts to the ABC.

But it is not just health, education or the ABC; it is the NBN as well. I gave one example of a broken promise, the promise to prioritise the worst places first. But it is not the only broken promise on the NBN. The government promised that everyone would have access to 25 megabits per second by 2016. That promise has been broken. Tony Abbott published an open letter to the Australian people on election night saying that the NBN would be built within three years. That is not going to happen either. We were told the NBN would cost only $29.5 billion. Now that promise has been broken. We were promised that Infrastructure Australia would be the organisation that would do the cost-benefit analysis. That promise has been broken. We were told there would be no new taxes. That promise has been broken.

I am not talking about the petrol tax or the now departed GP tax. I am talking about the NBN tax. As of two weeks ago, if you build a new home then you will have to pay $600 to NBN Co to get the NBN connected to your new home in a greenfields site. As at 1 July, that will go up to $900. Last week, the Minister for Communications made a very interesting speech at The Brisbane Club, where he said the problem with the budget was the sales job and that what they needed to do was explain the budget properly and do what he has done with the NBN. But if anyone thinks this is right, then I would argue they are deluding themselves. The problem with the budget was not the sales job; it was the substance. It is littered with broken promises and it is fundamentally unfair.

It is exactly the same with the NBN—a series of broken promises and also fundamentally unfair. Let me give you an example of what happened the day the Brisbane Club speech. At 10 pm last Thursday night, the government very quietly put on the NBN website a new policy called Technology Choice. There was no press release and no press conference. It was just quietly put on the website. Under this policy, if you live in a fibre-to-the-node area you can get fibre, but it will cost you anywhere 'from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.' On top of that, there is a $600 cost just to get a quote. In other words, if you are in a fibre-to-the-node area you can get it, but you will potentially have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for it. In other words, fibre for the rich and copper for the rest. This is another example of how the NBN—just like the budget we have been debating—is fundamentally unfair.

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