Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Excellent. Hopefully we can actually get a realistic answer to this.

I am very pleased to see that Bassendean is back on the rollout, and also that Armadale and Kelmscott are suburbs that are going to be included in the rollout over the next two years. But in both of these areas the minister has indicated, or NBN Co has indicated, that they will not be using fibre to the premises; it will be the multitechnology mix. I thought, 'Okay, we know anecdotally what is going on with our copper'. So I asked NBN Co, who are proposing, presumably, on the basis of these announcements to roll out a fibre-to-the-node option—and I have done a number of FOI requests—if they could they show us what documentation they had regarding the capacity and the state of the copper wire in those networks: those serviced by the Bassendean exchange and those in Armadale and Kelmscott. NBN Co came back to me, in both instances, to both FOI requests, and said that they have absolutely no documentation relating to the state and the capacity of the copper wire in these areas.

Minister, I have written to you and asked if you could then explain, given this businesslike and methodical way in which you are proposing to go about this rollout, how you are going to be able to roll out a technology when the medium that you are seeking to use is something about which you have absolutely zero knowledge? Please explain to me how we can be rolling out the NBN into Bassendean using the copper wire, when NBN Co tells us again and again that it has absolutely no information about this medium it is seeking to use?

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