Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

It was three foot six in Queensland, I think four foot 8½ in New South Wales and five foot two in Victoria. So every time a train crossed a state border, they had to—

Mr Husic interjecting—

That is right—it was crazy, but they had an excuse at the time because they were different states, so different people made decisions. But this government for the last 2½ years has had total control of this and, again, the decision to go back to copper when the rest of the world is going fibre to the home, the decision to start rolling out copper, to start repairing copper, is extraordinary and yet they did it. It totally and absolutely beggars belief.

We know that when Prime Minister Abbott handed the NBN over to the then Minister for Communications, he was instructed to demolish the NBN. We know that that was the instruction that was given. On command, the now Prime Minister did just that, but there is no excuse that, when he became Prime Minister and was in total control, he allowed this particular piece of infrastructure to go down the path that it is going.

Let's look at what he did at the time: he appointed Liberal staffers, Liberal Party advisers and strident critics of the NBN to a committee to investigate what to do the about the NBN. He basically put saboteurs in charge of policy development. In an absurdly pessimistic quantification by that committee, it based its analysis on the ridiculous idea that, by 2023, the average household would only want 15 megabits per second. It is not enough now. It is also by the way what we average now but it is not even enough to do the things we know that people want to do. It is not fast enough for decent Netflix. It is actually not fast enough even now, and they put forward this ridiculous quantification that households would only be wanting 15 megabits per second by 2023. That is an extraordinary assertion by what was known as the Vertigan panel.

Then the government, of course, proceeded to put together this shonky, low-tech version of an NBN—dared continue to call it a national broadband network even though it is nowhere near it. We still have copper being rolled out down the street in Carlingford and we have now seen it blow out. This minister who said it would be delivered faster, be cheaper and sooner got it all completely wrong. He estimated the second-rate NBN would cost $41 billion; it is now costing $56 billion—that is a 47 per cent blow-out. The fibre to the node was estimated to cost $600 per home; it has now blown out to $1600 per home—that is a 167 per cent blow-out or $1,000 per home.

They budgeted $55 million to fix up the copper; it is now $641 million to fix up the copper and growing. It is that fixing up of the copper that is delaying things so incredibly badly—$641 million to fix up copper? It is cheaper to roll out fibre. It is cheaper to do it the right way. It would have cost less now and it will certainly cost less than the maintenance that will go into upgrading last century's system. They are rolling out last century's system, and all this century we are going to pay to repair it. This is absurd.

They estimated that they would have 2.61 million homes connected to the NBN by 2016 and they will only have between 10,000 and 875,000 by the end of December this year. They said, by the way, that every home would have 25 megabits per second minimum by the end of 2016. Well Parramatta is not even on the map for 2016. We were under the old plan under the previous government. Parramatta, as you would expect—a CBD, the centre of one of the largest economies in Australia, 80,000 small businesses surrounding Western Sydney—would actually be on the list quite early. It was on the list for 2016. It got ripped off the list pretty quickly when the government changed—I think North Sydney got added instead: Parramatta went off; North Sydney went on. And now, in 2016, even though every household is supposed to have 25 megabits per second by the end of this year, we are not even on the map. Parramatta, the second CBD in Sydney, is not even on the map.

Deputy Speaker Goodenough, go around and talk to small business in Parramatta—and big business for that matter—and it is the first thing they talk about: this essential infrastructure. This is not some glamorous opt-in opt-out technology we are talking about; this is the basic communications system for the world. When the Prime Minister gets up here and talks about services being exported to Asia and how wonderful all of that is, when he gets up and talks about this wonderful world of the future and the sharing economy and start-ups, this is the basis of all that. You cannot have a sharing economy, if people cannot actually get online and get decent speeds. If you do not have decent speeds and a critical mass of fibre, then you will not have entrepreneurs working as hard as they can to develop new ways to use it. If you do not have the population on fibre, then you will not have the kind of innovation that we need if we want to own the products of the future. You will not have people in country towns providing services to Asia, if speeds are still—let's face it—pretty close to dial-up.

I was in a country town, Bemboka, just a couple of years ago. It is not in the middle of nowhere; it is between Canberra and the snow. It is a few hours away. I went into an art gallery, which someone had just opened. I found these beautiful pottery cups and I thought I would buy them—nice gallery. He took half an hour to complete my credit card transaction. He ended up walking out into the middle of the field and holding it up, trying to get a signal. If I did not actually want the cups and feel sorry for this guy, who had just started a business in a place where he could not do credit card transactions, I would have walked out. If it had been Sydney, I would not have waited half an hour. But I waited half an hour for this small business in a reasonably located country town to wander around, holding his credit card device in the air trying get a signal—in the paddock. This is what this government is leaving people with.

You can hear the member for Indi talk about her NBN, because they got the real one. She came in here today and talked about how fabulous it was, because she got the real one. Listen to the member for Shortland, Bendigo or any member who has had this shonky second-rate, last-century—I am not even going to call it the NBN, because it is not—infrastructure rolled out in their electorate and they will tell you what a mess it is. They will tell you that as soon as the kids get home from school and logon to do their homework, forget it; the speed is out the window. Unless you get on between 11 and two when no-one is home, forget it. What about if you happen to be a small business or if you happen to be working from home? And we want people to do that, by the way. We actually want these hubs where people work closer to home. We do not want everyone getting in their car and unnecessarily driving to an office in the city because they do not have broadband or their internet connection is not fast enough so they have to continue to drive in, and we keep upgrading the roads and public transport system to cope with the tens of thousands of people unnecessarily travelling. We want people to work from home. But how on earth does a small business that relies on upload and download do it if they are getting speeds of five megabytes per second and less? In Parramatta, that is what we get.

I surveyed my community last year and I asked them to test their NBN connections. The worst was the suburb of Merrylands, where they are getting download speeds as low as 0.14 megabytes per second.

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