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

I am happy to second this motion of the member for Ryan. I think this is an incredibly serious issue, as has been acknowledged on both sides of the House. NBN is essentially about our future, our international competitiveness. We are constantly telling our community that we have to be prepared to be globally competitive yet, unfortunately, this government has decided that they are going to lump us with an infrastructure rollout that is going to be substandard, that will put us well behind where our regional competitors already are. We are going to be left with a broadband product that is nowhere as good as that that we see in Singapore, in Korea, in Japan and increasingly in parts of China. Basically we getting a late 20th century product rather than a 21st century product.

On Saturday we had a great NBN forum in central Armadale in the seat of Canning. People there are acutely aware of just how bad their internet services have always been. They were indeed on Labor's rollout plan and under Labor's plan they were scheduled to get fibre-to-the-premises by June 2016. Now under the great Malcolm Turnbull scheme—'NBN light' or 'fraud band'—they are scheduled to get a lesser product and get that six months later. So now they are scheduled to get fibre-to-the-node and they are scheduled to get that six months later.

But our real concern is not only are we putting a lot of money into a substandard system but we believe that this is going to be simply not deliverable. The minister has acknowledged that he does not actually have any awareness of the state of the copper in Kelmscott and Armadale. As we heard over and over again from the community at this forum on Saturday, when it rains voice calls drop out routinely in this area. It gives us some idea of just what the state of this copper wire is.

The minister, when I questioned him during consideration in detail of the budget bills, claimed that this was all just a question of pair gains and that the problem is that we have made too many pair gains. Quite frankly, my advice is that there is a very limited number of the pair gains that he is talking about in this area and the problem is fundamentally that of the state of the copper. A voice call would not drop-out when it rains because of a pair gain system or a deficiency in the pair gain system. We have a minister here that is failing to realise and appreciate and take in hand this fundamental problem that exists—that much of the area over which he wants to lay out this fibre-to-the-node really has in that last kilometre a very degraded network, which simply is not going to be capable of delivering even the modest late-20th century speeds that he is undertaking.

There was also great concern expressed in the area about the potential for vandalism of those nodes in areas where there are social problems. Not taken into account is the much greater expense that is involved in maintaining this system. With fibre-to-the-node you need to have power boxes, you need to change the nature of the signal as it moves from fibre to copper and you need to keep it cool. This is going to be, I think at the end of the day, a system that will be greatly discredited. My very great concern for the people of Canning, for the people of Armadale and Kelmscott who have got very poor internet services, is that it is simply not going to be possible for them to deliver, even by December 2016. The infrastructure just simply is not up to it. We are going to find that out, unfortunately, only at the very last moment when they dig up the pits and find out exactly what is going on.

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