Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on the NBN because Townsville was chosen as an early rollout site. Of course, the NBN was done in response to the GFC. It raised many questions. One of the first questions was: why was the rollout done in a higgledy-piggledy style? It was to bring fibre to the premise of everyone's house. As the member for Lalor, who is now leaving the chamber, has said, it is not being rolled out to businesses. It would make more sense to me if we had rolled it out to business first. This is not a social enterprise or a social enhancement; this is an asset that will be sold by government. If you are going to get an asset that is going to be sold by government, surely you want it to be where the money is going to be made. If you roll the NBN out to my 84-year-old mother's house, where she checks her Facebook maybe once or twice a day and answers one email, there would be no real return on investment.

Townsville was an early rollout site, which was a gift and a curse. My city, which had suburbs with ADSL2+ already in abundance, was chosen as an NBN rollout site. Suburbs like Condon and Kirwan, parts of Belgian Gardens and other parts of my city were still on dial-up and are still on dial-up. The member for Lalor mentioned the relationship between NBN and Telstra. I have to tell you in my city now the relationship between Telstra and NBN is getting better and better and better, but I agree with her that the relationship at first was fraught because of the fractious and difficult ideological approach by the previous Labor government. They told Telstra that no matter what they did they would not get paid for it. So in all those new greenfield sites that were coming in and in all the areas where they had advanced capacity or they could bring in more ADSL2+ or shift it around, there was no reason for Telstra to do any work because they were never going to get paid for it. One of the first things that Malcolm Turnbull did when he took over as the Minister for Communications was repair that relationship with Telstra. It has borne great fruit. We are now in a better situation when it comes to the way we roll out this thing.

It depends where you want to go. It seems to me that the member for Lalor was saying that we should have rolled this out to business first and was asking why we are doing it to the home. It seems to me that she wants to change the rules of the game halfway through. The previous Minister for Communications, Stephen Conroy, said it would be led by bringing everyone onto the NBN with fibre to the premise, except for those people in remote and rural Australia. That was the difficult part. When both parties took up their position in 2007 their policies were very similar about needing to bring people in from the out and not build it again.

You had the ridiculous situation in the member the Chifley's electorate, which had UHF cabling for pay TV and full ADSL2 and then had the NBN hauled all over the top of it. Areas of my electorate, very much like areas of the member for Lalor's electorate, cannot understand why this map was originally done. What we are doing is rolling it out faster, more affordably to the customer and cheaper for the entire nation because we have to make sure that this thing is saleable at the end. To do that we must make sure that we have versatility in the rollout. In Townsville we had the entire CBD wired for the NBN for a good 12 to 14 months before we even had the technology to take it from the footpath to a multidwelling unit of offices.

We are trying to make sure that we do roll this thing out. This is not just about being able to watch Netflix or stream videos; this is about the future, and Townsville is seeing that future now. It still gets down to how much you want to spend on it. It still gets down to how much you are prepared to do, and fibre to the premises especially in difficult places is very expensive. I have a friend who is an engineer. He lives in Mundingburra, an early rollout site which had fibre to the premise. He reckoned it cost the NBN over $25,000 to get it from the footpath to his house because of the difficulty in accessing it. He is an engineer. He is on basic internet at home. He will pay about $50 a month for the NBN. It is going to take an awfully long time to get any return on that investment. Those are the sorts of things that we must do. I congratulate this government because in the entire time of the previous government we rolled it out to nearly 30,000 places and we have over 70,000 places already connected in Townsville.

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