Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman reported that NBN complaints surged by 160 per cent compared to the previous financial year. The Prime Minister called this a 'calamitous train wreck'. I agree. You shouldn't spend $50 billion on a network that gives you slower, less reliable and more expensive internet; a cost blowout of $20 billion; Australia slipping from 30th to 51st in international broadband rankings; and 76 per cent of NBN users reporting slow speeds, disconnections and dropouts. That is a calamitous train wreck, and the buck stops with the man who sits there.

Day after day, my electorate office is inundated with calls from Hotham constituents who are so frustrated that they cannot get connected to broadband and then, when they are connected, the problems are endless. I get complaints about faulty installations, poorly done installations, unreliable connections, dropouts, incompatibility with existing medical alarm services, and the unclear division of responsibility between NBN Co and telecommunications providers, leading to poor customer service.

On the other side, they say this is a mistake by Labor. That is wrong. The NBN was our Snowy Mountains; it was our electricity grid and our roads and our railways of the 21st century. When I ask local businesses to tell me one thing that government can do to help them more, they always talk to me about broadband. We had one chance to do it properly, with fibre. Instead, the government squibbed that opportunity and my constituents are paying the price.

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