Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad that the issue of small business was raised, because that is certainly something I would like to come back to. It is extraordinary that we have a Prime Minister who talks a lot about ours being an agile, innovative economy, but the one thing he has never properly invested in is a first-rate fibre-to-the-premises NBN, the kind of NBN that this nation actually needs. Members opposite have alluded to some alleged favouritism, where NBN was allegedly being built in areas that were already overserviced or well serviced perhaps. I would like to give the House some examples from Newcastle. Newcastle was a priority area for Labor, as it should be. But it was also a priority area for this government. Under Labor's plan, every home and every business in Newcastle was to get fibre to the premises within three years. It would have already been done and dusted by now. Here we are, in 2016, and what is the experience of the government's prioritising? We were in a priority rollout area, this government said. Well, the government initially removed vast areas of Newcastle from the so-called priority rollout, which we had to scramble to get included back on the NBN rollout. In addition to that, the experience of people in Newcastle has been illuminating, to say the least.

Those opposite purport to be champions of small business in this place and like to suggest that people on this side of the House do not understand small business, do not understand what they are going through. I would like to talk a little bit today about Mel and Gordon Allerton, the owners of a small business in Newcastle, in the suburb of Islington, an inner city area of Newcastle. They are the owners of Opposite Lock. It is an auto accessories place. Most of their business is not walk-in. Most of their business is done through online and telephone contact. They had a thriving business. Regretfully, in the last 15 months they have suffered 66 days of outages—66 days in which they cannot trade. They have lost tens of thousands of dollars. The great irony is that they are not even trying to connect to the NBN at this point. This is just to do with the fact that the old copper pit happens to be positioned out the front of their business, and it is the point of access, the node, which everybody who is trying to connect to the NBN is having to connect to. Whether the technicians are from Optus, Telstra or NBN Co, no-one wants to claim responsibility for most of the outages and stuff-ups in this case. But, regardless of who attempts to try and resolve this issue, invariably when you think you have got a fix it turns out that it creates another problem two doors down or down the track. It is because this is a shonky, second-rate NBN, a piece of infrastructure that this government is now relying on in order to deliver the needs not only of people today but allegedly of the future generations of Australian men and women. It is crazy.

Let me also talk briefly about some residential areas. There are brand-new greenfield builds in areas that are already NBN ready, allegedly. We are not talking about places under construction or places sometime in the future; these are NBN-ready areas. There are brand-new apartments being built, allegedly able to hook up to the NBN. I have been working for six months with a constituent to get the NBN connected to his brand-new apartment. And, when it finally happened, they managed to completely stuff it up again. At the end of the day, he ended up paying for his own electrical contractor to ensure that the connection was made properly. That is another example.

A final example is that in another residential area in the west of my electorate, out in Fletcher, there are brand-new housing developments, with lots of young, professional families moving into the area. Stages 1 to 4 of the development are getting fibre to the node, and stage 5 and onwards will get fibre to the premises. This is within a very tiny geographical area. This the classic digital divide that Labor warned this government about. Under Labor's plan, there were no losers. We do not back winners and losers, but the members opposite are creating winners and losers everywhere.

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