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

This morning we got another piece of correspondence.

Please help—

said Steve Burford.

We live in Morley and our internet is so poor. Very slow speeds and about 10 to 20 drop-outs per day. After a support call with iinet for 9 months, nothing can be done. Morley exchange is not even on the non plan yet. My girlfriend is on track to fail her online uni course and it's putting unnecessary stress in an already stressful life. We are literally looking to move house to fix this. In this day and age it's on par with living in a house without electricity. We are 9 km from the cbd how can we still have such poor internet.

The reason very clearly is that we have the Turnbull government in place and we have 'fraudband' being not delivered around our community. We know that the Morley exchange—the area where Steve's house is—was on the rollout; it was on the Labor Party rollout plan that was put in place in 2013. The Telstra exchange was upgraded and it should have had a proper broadband link by now. Instead of us getting our second-rate system by the end of 2016, which was the electoral promise, what we actually had from the Turnbull government was a lengthy delay of 18 months where nothing happened. The only thing going on was those projects initiated under Labor—fibre to the premises was rolled out, and yet we had a hiatus of some 18 months while we looked at putting in a second-rate system. So people like Steve and his girlfriend are living, effectively, in a non-broadband environment where their access to the internet is not sufficient for them to do the most basic tasks, in particular using it to study online courses.

I want to pick up a point that was made by our shadow minister the other day, and it is the decision by AT&T, the giant American telecommunications company, to go back and redo those areas where it had fibre to the node and deliver fibre to the premises. They have announced that it is going to actually retrofit 21 cities across America in this way. They see that they need to offer speeds of one gigabyte. What we are talking about here with 'fraudband' is 25 megabytes. How do we think that what we are putting in place now is going to be anywhere near adequate when those countries that we will be competing with, countries that we are entering into free trade agreements with, are going to be operating on a gigabyte? If we are lucky, if the government ever get 'fraudband' underway, all we are going to be getting is 25 megabytes. It is completely pathetic.

I was interested to see what vice-president Lori Lee said when AT&T made the announcement of the fibre-to-the-premises plan. She said, 'We're delivering advanced services that offer consumers and small businesses the ability to do more faster, will help communities create the new wave of innovation and will encourage economic development.' This is the fundamental farce of what we are seeing with the Prime Minister. We have a Prime Minister who talks about the centrality of innovation to our economic future, yet at the core of his government's program is a scheme to introduce, one day, some time over the next five to six years, a plan that is going to lock us into the 20th century, when all of our rivals in the United States, in Japan, in Korea, in Singapore and in China are going to be having speeds 10 times that which we are being offered in Australia.

This is a really central problem to the Prime Minister's supposed innovation agenda. You cannot innovate, you cannot have small business innovate, you cannot have decentralisation and you cannot have people in small communities coming up with great competitive plans when they are hamstrung by 20th century technology. (Time expired)

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