Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member Macquarie for her fantastic explanation of the issues, which affect my electorate as well. It may surprise you to know that I'm not by nature a complainer or a whinger, but on this issue it is just a farce that we have been left in this situation by a man who thinks he invented the internet. I've spoken a number of times in this chamber about the poor state of affairs that the NBN is in and how this Prime Minister has truly bungled a once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-lifetime nation-building project, but bungled it has been. Judging by the number of constituents I hear from who have issues with the NBN, I believe the Macarthur region in outer south-western Sydney is one of the worst hit areas nationwide. I shouldn't be surprised about this. State and federal Liberal-National party governments have neglected to provide infrastructure in many areas—including housing, education, health and transport—in south-west Sydney, so why should the NBN be any different? Indeed, it's no different. There is a very poor provision of services. As the member for Macquarie has explained, those who are most disadvantaged appear to be worse off, and there is very little commitment to (1) admitting there's a problem—and there clearly is—and (2) fixing it. It's clear that this government, under the stewardship of the Prime Minister, does not understand how to deliver on vital infrastructure projects. That is true across the board, but particularly so with the NBN.

I spoke last year in this chamber about the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's report which identified many cases in south-west Sydney of constituents who had been let down by this government's second-rate NBN. I have spoken to many telecommunications engineers who tell me that this problem was completely predictable. By using a half-baked NBN relying on the old copper network in many suburbs in my electorate that are 30, 40 or 50 years old, we were never going to get adequate services, and indeed that has proved to be the case.

There have been so many issues. I even held an NBN forum on two occasions in my electorate, inviting people to share their stories with our shadow minister for communications, Michelle Rowland. I appreciate that many people are not always available to come down to my office between nine and five, Monday to Friday, so I held the forum on a weeknight in a local community hall. Even though there had been lots of complaints, I expected maybe only 20 or 30 constituents to turn up, but in fact hundreds attended. Given that evenings in Macarthur can be very hectic for families, with kids to be fed and bathed, homework to be done, and people often getting home from work after travelling for hours, many people attended these forums and voiced their concerns in no uncertain manner about the NBN—not only the service they were receiving but also the problems they were having in making their difficulties understood by the telecommunications providers and the government in particular.

The vitriol directed towards NBN Co and the Liberal-National government is so strong within Macarthur that there are many more complaints to my office every day. People express their concerns to me after busy days at work and school, along with all the other issues that families face. To be perfectly honest, the volume of complaints my office receives has slightly slowed down in the last few months. When I inquired of long-term complainants why they had stopped complaining, many of them said that they had found the issues too difficult to deal with, and the lack of response from providers so poor, that they had given up.

There have been instances where many small businesses have had to close or send staff home because their phone lines were down, their internet didn't work and EFTPOS services had been disrupted. As the owner of a small business in Campbelltown and Camden myself, I can assure you that such disruptions can bring businesses to a standstill, cost a lot of money and are incredibly frustrating. Currently there are even instances of local medical centres losing all phone lines and telecommunication services. It means they're unable to process Medicare claims; bulk-bill; see X-ray films and pathology results; forward patient records, which can be vital in emergencies, to other medical services, such as hospital emergency departments; and sometimes even answer the phone to book in appointments.

There have also been instances where the elderly face significant hardships at the hands of this government and NBN Co. Even in the last month it has come to my office's attention that a 95-year-old had been without a stable phone line for six months. Surely this is something that demands urgent change. This is all due to the government's poorly functioning NBN. I don't believe that this government, this Prime Minister and this communications minister understand the impact that their bungled NBN has had on many disadvantaged Australians. If they had any appreciation of the difficulties they have caused, surely they would do everything in their power to change the situation. It has all been predictable. Even now suburbs are still being connected to the NBN through what we know are very poor, terribly degraded copper phone lines. There is going to be a problem.

The tumultuous nature of the NBN rollout under this government, and the lack of quality service provided by their second-rate NBN, has been crippling for many small businesses and people in the Macarthur electorate and has caused a great deal of distress for many families. Like the lack of proper infrastructure in many other areas—transport and health—this disadvantage is predictable, it's occurring now, and the government is doing nothing about it. I put it to you that, in this day and age, no business should have to close due to the government's inability to manage telecommunications, and no individual should be made to worry due to their inability to get hold of a family member who lives by themselves, but it's still happening.

It's one thing for somebody in the middle of a city to be hit hard by the government's failures, but, in an area that lacks proper public transport and where many suburbs are quite isolated, this can be catastrophic. There may well be people who can't even get proper mobile phone reception in some areas of my electorate. Under the Liberal-National government, NBN Co and telecommunications companies expect people to merely get another device or find some other way to communicate, but that's not true for many in my electorate in south-west Sydney.

As outrageous as this is, at least those in built-up and metropolitan areas have an alternative. Those in remote, rural and regional areas—and even outer suburban areas like my electorate—are being made to suffer unnecessarily because of the government's lack of urgency and understanding to respond to these issues. I can only assume the coalition expects people who live in more isolated parts of the country to revert to some other way of communicating, such as smoke signals and carrier pigeons, when they're being let down by this second-rate NBN. What else is somebody who lives in a mobile phone blackspot supposed to do when their phone lines are down, they can't communicate using the NBN and they're in distress? How is a farmer whose nearest neighbour is 40 kilometres away supposed to maintain contact with the rest of the world if his phone line is down, the NBN is down, and the government can't ensure stability in telecommunications?

Once again we see the Liberal-National government's utter contempt for those in regional Australia and less affluent suburbs. It's truly a wonder how the coalition agreement is still intact and that the Nationals have any relevance left with their original voter base, when we consider these realities and their lack of urgency in attempting to get the Prime Minister to see the importance of these issues. The biggest joke in modern-day politics is that the Nationals believe they're standing up for regional Australia when they're doing nothing of the sort, particularly when you look at the NBN, where they can't even ensure connectivity for their constituents in their regions, yet they sit meekly by and watch the Prime Minister thumb his nose at them. Perhaps if their party were less focused on inner turmoil they would have steered the government in a better direction with the NBN. I also think that, on the recent announcements about cutbacks in the ABC—when the ABC is so important to rural and regional Australia—the National Party should surely be saying to the coalition: 'Do something about this. We need to expand the services of the ABC, expand their reach and provide them with adequate funding to deliver to rural and regional Australia.' Yet the Nationals sit there and say and do nothing. They seem to cave in to the concerns of the 'Hansons' and to the right wing of the Liberal Party, with their attacks on the ABC which are contributing to poor communications in rural and regional areas.

Perhaps the second biggest joke is the fact that this Prime Minister, who made a fair bit of his fortune in telecommunications, still thinks he can flog the dead horse that is his second-rate NBN without doing anything about it. Madam Speaker, you may remember a time when the Prime Minister thought it was a good idea, under the leadership of his former boss the member for Warringah, to rip apart Labor's NBN. Apparently, there was no need to ensure that everyone had an equal service. Some would get a first-class fibre-to-the-premises connection and others would get a dodgy fibre-to-the-node connection, and that was just tough luck, because those who were getting fibre-to-the-node were mostly in rural and regional areas, in disadvantaged areas and in outer suburban areas which had no relevance to the Prime Minister because he was fine in Point Piper getting his fibre-to-the-premises NBN.

The existing copper was fine, the Prime Minister believed—even though I know he was told the opposite. He was told that there were going to be problems, and yet he still persisted with his second-rate NBN. There was apparently no need to install a state-of-the-art world-class network for all because the people who mattered were going to be okay. We, on this side of the House, knew this to be a falsehood and that the coalition's second-rate service would not pass the test of time. And, indeed, it hasn't. It was not long before we uncovered the truth—and I am happy to admit I was on a very steep learning curve. The truth about the NBN is that some people are getting an excellent service, some people are getting a reasonable service and many—10, 15 or maybe even 20 per cent—are getting a terrible service or no service. Yet it was okay, according to this government and this Prime Minister, for them not to be treated as first-class citizens. The existing copper network is not sufficient. It's quite clear this is the case, and nothing has been done to change that. We will continue to have these difficult issues without it being explained appropriately to the Australian population.

What does the Liberal National Party government do now? It doesn't replace the dodgy old lines with fibre reconnections. It has purchased more copper to service their second-rate scheme, causing continuing problems. It just beggars belief. It's not going to get better; it's going to continue. How anybody can believe that the Liberal National Party government is economically responsible when they make a move such as this is astonishing. This decision angers me, as a member of this place, as a taxpayer and as someone who feels that we are all equal in this society. It just reeks of incompetence and a lack of care.

The public were assured that this government's NBN would come quicker and at a cheaper cost. Time and time and time again, we have witnessed a complete blowout in the rollout, a blowout in expenditure and a blowout in complaints. With the taxpayers being made to foot the bill to purchase more out-of-date technology, it's likely that matters will just get worse. They can't do anything to roll out infrastructure properly, and it has now become past a joke.

Feeling optimistic, I am quite hopeful that eventually government will learn the lesson. It may well be too late for them—they're taking years to learn that—but maybe, eventually, they will consider the change. It will probably be too late—they won't be in government anymore. The optimism that I had initially about the NBN, with the Prime Minister's reassurance, has been crushed. I have come to the realisation now that there's not going to be any short-term move by this government to improve the NBN.

With my constituents, I'm trying to do my best to make sure that their complaints are heard and the problems can be remedied, but, for many, I can't. It would seem that the NBN Co and the government have, in fact, not been listening and are not taking any serious action.

I also would like to point out, as an aside, that the percentage of premises able to connect to the NBN has actually dropped since November last year—fewer people can somehow connect to the NBN—according to the NBN Co itself, because some of them will never get a proper service. It is staggering to me that this is still the case.

I would also really like to acknowledge another piece of information that I've uncovered from NBN Co itself. They said:

We are currently running our repairs with 85 per cent of NBN faults within our agreed service levels …

So there's still 15 per cent that is not being treated appropriately. I may be mistaken, but to me it sounds as though the NBN Co is failing. (Time expired)

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