Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry to say it, but this includes Bonner as well. In these electorates no-one in an existing home or business has the NBN—not a soul. Remember that the Prime Minister said that everyone in these electorates would have the NBN this year. It is an extraordinary breach of faith.

It is the same on the west coast of Tasmania. Before the last election, the Prime Minister said that he would build a fibre link to the west coast of Tasmania. Both sides of politics said the same thing: we would build fibre to the west coast of Tasmania. Then, slyly and sneakily, without any announcement, in August last year the Prime Minister switched from building a fibre link to the west coast of Tasmania to putting them on the satellite version of the NBN. Understandably, the people of the west coast of Tasmania have had a gutful of that. They are awfully peeved off. I went to a community meeting in Queenstown in Tasmania last month with the local member. I have never been to a meeting where more people were so angry about being ripped off and dudded by this government on the NBN. They said things in that meeting that I could not repeat in this parliament. They were seriously angry and felt they had been dudded, and that was why I was in Tasmania again last week to announce that a Shorten Labor government will reverse this sneaky, bad decision by Malcolm Turnbull and give the people of the west coast of Tasmania the fibre link that they were promised.

Why has all this happened? Why have there been all the broken promises? How did the Prime Minister get this policy that he put together three years ago so wrong? There is one word for it, and it is 'copper'. He thought that he could do fibre-to-the-node quite simply and quite cheaply. He thought it would be easy, but he seriously underestimated how hard it would be to go from building a fibre NBN to a copper NBN. He said that he could negotiate access to the copper from Telstra quickly. He said he could do it in a couple of months. It ended up taking nearly two years to seal the deal with Telstra. He also underestimated how much it would cost to build this copper version of the NBN fibre-to-the-node. He said it would be 600 bucks a home for fibre-to-the-node. But, again, that was a massive error. In fact, it was $1,600 a home. He also underestimated the cost of fixing the copper. He said it would cost $55 million to fix the old copper that they had bought back from Telstra. He said it was a conservative assumption. In fact, it is $783 million. It has blown out by more than 1,000 per cent.

He has also had problems with the rollout of this copper NBN. I have a good example. A story that was in The Sydney Morning Herald a couple of months ago revealed that nbn co were supposed to have rolled out fibre-to-the-node to 94,000 homes by 12 February, but they got nowhere near that. According to leaked documents, they only hit 29,000. Then last month there was another leaked document. This time, in the Financial Review, the headline 'Leaked NBN documents confirm lengthy delays' revealed that, of the first 40 fibre-to-the-node areas, all of them are behind schedule. Not one of them has been built on time. Every single one of those first 40 fibre-to-the-node areas are all behind schedule.

But it gets even worse, because where it has been switched on it is not working properly. I have told the parliament stories before about the problems in the Hunter, on the Central Coast and in Bundaberg where people have signed on to fibre-to-the-node and are now getting slower speeds than they were getting with ADSL. A good example of that was a recent headline in the Hunter. 'Hunter's National Broadband Network in crisis as consumers are plagued by delays and speed issues' tells the story of one man, Mark Jackson, who said: 'As soon as we connected, our speeds went down really badly, to the point where I can't even use Facebook'. And he is just one. There are many people in the Hunter who are complaining to good local members of parliament and complaining to nbn co, saying, 'Fix this mess.' It has got that bad that last week nbn co actually issued an official apology to the people of the Hunter for the mess that they have made.

Then, yesterday, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman released its complaints data for the first three months of this year. When you look at the complaints data, one thing stands out: all these suburbs—like Toukley, Newcastle, Warners Bay and Belmont North—are in areas where Malcolm Turnbull's slower, second-rate copper version of the NBN has been switched on. They are all areas where complaints are up. In fact, six of the top 10 suburbs in the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's complaint report yesterday are areas where fibre-to-the-node has recently been switched on.

It gets even worse than that. I have told the parliament before about how much new copper this government is buying to make this second-rate network work. It is 10 million metres of new copper—enough to connect Melbourne to Mumbai. But now it gets even more bizarre than that, because I recently found this job ad on Seek: Manager Copper Service Assurance:

The Manager Copper Service Assurance will lead an nbn team working closely with the Managed Service Partner teams in Melbourne, Mumbai and Delhi. This role will provide visible leadership in relation to the performance management for all aspects of inbound/outbound Service Management.

This role will be based in Mumbai, India. This is not a fly-in fly-out role. It will require the manager of copper service assurance to reside in India on an ongoing basis. Not only have they bought back Telstra's old copper network, not only are they now buying 10 million metres of new copper, but now they are sending jobs to Mumbai to fix their second-rate copper network. What a mess! It is going to take a Labor government to fix this mess.

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