Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

It was an excellent segment. I can absolutely endorse it, and I look forward to us being invited back together again to have a discussion about these matters. The reality is that the bill before us has started to unpick and unwind the very important principle that underlined our initial National Broadband Network rollout proposition, and that was that the way you structured the National Broadband Network as infrastructure was to ensure that the wholesale cost was consistent across the country. Why do you do that? You do that because in rural and regional Australia, as we know full well, the cost would be so much more significant than it would be for city based areas and, as a result, the flow-on retail price for people would be significantly higher. So we had that underlying, underpinning equalisation of the costs at the wholesale level—and that is really, really important to regional and rural Australia.

The bill before us was based on the recommendations of what was called the Vertigan panel, a group of Liberal Party staffers and some Liberal Party advisors. I do not think there were any National Party people in there. That might have been where they went wrong. That might have been the problem: there should have been more of my learned colleague opposite's ilk, because, as it is said, it is the National Party people who understand what the implications for rural and regional Australia are. They were all very strident critics of the National Broadband Network. Clearly they were there to do a job, and they did it: they put forward an advisory report, a market and regulatory report, to the current Prime Minister. Sadly for the government, the response to that has been absolutely scathing. The Competitive Carriers Coalition released a statement calling on the recommendations to be 'binned'. They might have been able to call on it to be actually delivered over the new NBN, because it would have taken so long to come through the system it would have been irrelevant. But, no, they just said, 'Don't even bother with that; just bin it.' They said:

After deliberating all year, the Vertigan panel has recommended that Australia look to emulate 1970s US telephone industry policy to promote investment in 21st century broadband networks ... most of the Vertigan recommendations represent nothing more than rehashed, discredited theoretical arguments promoted by opponents of regulatory reform and the NBN.

The industry response to the bill was scathing. In particular, they pointed out the risks to consumers—to the detriment of the consumer—that would come from those proposed measures.

I have some fantastic broadband advocacy groups in my local area. I work a lot with the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network—ACCAN, as it is commonly known. They have also raised some serious concerns about consumer detriment in the report, which is the basis for legislation that is now before the House, but the government ignored those concerns in the majority report of the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee. It recommended, in that majority report of the review of the legislation, that the bill be passed without amendment. This week, however, the government has been forced into what could only be described as a very humiliating backdown on the bill. The amendments to be introduced by the government follow, to the letter, Labor's recommendations in its dissenting report to the committee. We are glad that they have, finally, heeded the recommendations of industry and are bedding down those recommendations that were put forward.

We now have a national broadband network rolling out, under this government, that is creating as much anger and disappointment that the current Prime Minister promised to stop when he was the shadow minister and the minister. We heard all the big promises about how they were going to be so much more effective in managing this infrastructure rollout. It was going to be faster. It was going to be cheaper. We see very little of that on the ground.

In the time remaining, I just want to take members to the direct local implications for my area of what is going on. The member for Perth, quite rightly, indicated that I am, certainly, as with most of my community, no fan of copper. We live in a coastal area. We get quite heavy rainfall. We have known for a long time that, when you get water in the pits, you get disruption to both your phone and broadband service delivery. That copper has been squeezed for everything that it can give. It is in a very parlous state and it needs to be replaced.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand the decision by this government to say, 'We'll actually fund ripping that old decrepit copper out of the ground and replace it with new copper.' Where the thinking behind that lies is an absolute mystery to me, and to many of my constituents who I regularly have to deal with after heavy rainfalls. Indeed, we have an ongoing mass disruption in place, at the moment, from rainfalls in January. We need that copper gone. We need 21st century technology put in place. We need the fibre to go in the ground, because it is not impacted by wet weather in the same way that copper is.

As a result of much of the frustration that is going on locally, there have been a few, very active, voices developing in my community. Initially, of course, there was a lot of complaint, and I had to deal with a lot of contact with constituents about the fact that, under Labor's National Broadband Network website, their suburbs were on the map. Now, to be fair, before the change of government most people were ringing me saying, 'I'm on the map but it says it won't start for three years, and I'm frustrated by that.' It was a point of frustration, as people increasingly understood, in a very short period and represented a shift in how they were using broadband in their homes. Five or six years ago, you would talk to people about a national broadband project and, generally, you would have very technology-active constituents saying, 'This is great. We want this.' The broader community were generally more, 'That might be okay' but they were not really engaged. In that five or six years, that has completely changed.

There would not be a household in my community now that is not insisting that they need not only fast broadband but also reliable broadband. The big issue has become reliability. Speed is frustrating, not just download but upload speed, particularly if you have a university student at home doing very content-heavy submissions and assignments, if you are running a small business from home where you are exchanging information in both directions or if you are trying to work from home. I have a very large commuter base in my electorate who work in Sydney. A lot of them are professional people who do very content-heavy work at home. So the upload/download speeds is a very significant issue for them. But the big issue is reliability.

If you are trying to run a small business and your broadband is down for days or, indeed, weeks—and, on a few occasions, I have had to deal with 'months'—you are almost killing off that small business. That is the outcome of unreliable technology. In my area, and I am sure it is the case in many other areas, most of that breakdown and problem is driven by the issue of the copper. Even in areas where the broadband may roll out to the node, I have an ongoing fear that my life as a member for that region will continue to be consumed by issues to do with heavy rainfall and the effect on that last piece of technology from the node—the copper—still being in the ground.

People were devastated to disappear off the map. So they all started contacting me again saying, 'I know I was writing to you about why we're on a three-year build and not an immediate one, but we've disappeared off the map. What on earth does that mean?' For those people, not only did they no longer have some sense, at least, of when the build would commence but also it was a pretty clear indication they were going to get fibre to the node as well and not fibre to the premise. That generated quite a lot of campaigning. There is a great local group. They are a Facebook based group. They have indicated to me that it is frustrating because, quite often, they cannot update their Facebook page due to their poor connections. People who have visited the Illawarra would be aware that the northern suburbs of the Illawarra are a beautiful part of the world. There is an escarpment that comes down and meets the sea. There are a whole lot of villages up and down that area—fantastic lifestyle with beautiful views. A lot of people in that area work from home, have businesses they run from home, do contract work and so forth. They are now back on the map but they had disappeared for the last 2½ years. They were so frustrated they set up this Facebook page. It is called '2508+disconnected'—2508 is the postcode. They are now a very active member of the ACCAN network. In fact I caught up with them when they were here just last week for the ACCAN forum that was held in this area. They continue to lobby very hard not only for fast but, most importantly, reliable broadband.

I would like to acknowledge Mark and Karen McKenzie, who initially set up that Facebook site. Sometimes I do not dare look at it because they are really on the ball. They pick up whenever there is a service breakdown or whenever there are delivery issues around the speeds that they are getting. I know that is like the canary in the mine—it is a warning to me that my office is about to get flooded with a whole lot of people complaining. Probably Telstra watches it avidly too because it is a pretty clear indication I am about to ring them as well.

The change that has occurred over the five for six years that we have been discussing broadband has been to me a really significant indication that people really are living the 21st-century lives that we were talking about five for six years ago. A really important survey was done by the Bundeena Chamber of Commerce in my area, which indicated an enormous percentage of local people working from home—if not full-time then part-time to avoid a couple of days commute—or running businesses and this infrastructure has to be not only fast but it has to be reliable. We continue to see a commitment by the government to this multi-technology mix that is just not going to deliver that into the future. I hope the next bit of legislation is a bit more organised and a bit less catastrophically amended. I look forward to further developments. (Time expired)

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