Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday the Treasurer stood at the dispatch box in the House, in his usual thunderous manner, to declare that the Turnbull government is a tax cutter. Yet here we are, a day later, debating this supposedly tax-cutting government's introduction of a new tax that will cost up to 450,000 Australians an extra $84 a year. There's eight weeks worth of tax cuts gone, just like that. If we've come to understand one thing about this government, it's that they say one thing and do another—from no cuts to the ABC and health to no dollar difference for school funding. They cannot be trusted at their word.

This new broadband tax is a direct result of this government's failure to properly implement the National Broadband Network. More particularly, it's this Prime Minister's failure—and it is a personal failure. He had personal carriage of this portfolio as the former communications minister, and he has had personal carriage as Prime Minister. The failure of the NBN under the Liberals can and should be laid at the feet of this Prime Minister, who promised Australians a cheaper and faster NBN. It's certainly cheaper, in the way that a Moskvitch is cheaper than a Ford. Its component parts are inferior. It's nowhere near as well designed, and it's falling apart before it's even finished. The NBN under this Prime Minister has become a cobbled-together mess, reliant on last-century copper that is incapable of delivering the services that the 21st century requires.

As a member of the parliament's NBN committee, I've heard testimony from witnesses, including home owners, academics, small-business people, technicians and bureaucrats. The evidence overwhelmingly is that the NBN being rolled out by this government is already not fit for purpose and is already proving to be a serious drag on our ability to compete in the global market. At the consumer level, the Liberals' NBN is failing at even the most rudimentary level. Families can't stream movies. Kids can't do their school and uni projects. Businesses can't get reliable connections for wireless transfer payments. And, to top it all off, despite having become this sad and broken thing, the NBN is still proving to be more expensive than the Prime Minister promised, and now he has to pay for it. More to the point, he's making Australians pay for it.

This new tax will compel broadband infrastructure providers to add $7.10 to their customers' monthly bills. You won't see any reference to this new tax in the budget papers. Because of the mysterious way that financial reporting works, it doesn't appear as that sort of revenue. There's no talk on morning shows about the new tax, which will cost Australians nearly $34 million a year. I think the shadow minister said that it will be close to half a billion dollars over 10 years. The tax will also be charged to all non-NBN consumers receiving fixed-line services capable of delivering a minimum speed of 25 megabits per seconds download. This essentially captures those receiving fibre to the node, fibre to the kerb, fibre to the basement, fibre to the premises or HFC. The government says the tax is necessary in order to guarantee the sustained rollout of broadband services throughout regional Australia, which is where I'm from. But the Prime Minister didn't say any of this before the election. This Prime Minister never told Australians he would be so utterly hopeless at his job that he planned to introduce a new tax simply to provide what is, for so many, a substandard internet experience.

Labor's approach was so different. We would have provided fibre to the premises to more than 93 per cent of Australians, with Australians in small regional towns—not big regional towns but small regional towns—and isolated properties to receive either fixed wireless or satellite services. And we would have done it without charging homeowners thousands of dollars more for a fibre to the premises connection, and we would have done it without imposing this tax, because Labor believes in the principle of a universal right to broadband access. We know that connection to the internet is as necessary to modern life as the telephone was 100 years ago. It is not a luxury that should be provided only to those who can afford it or in areas where someone can make money from it; it is a service all Australians deserve, no matter where they live, and it should have been done without this tax.

Labor is not opposing this measure. We don't like it—and we wouldn't have done it, because we would have funded national broadband properly—but, because of this government's incompetence, regional Australians risk being left behind without this revenue measure. Already people in regional electorates like mine are missing out on broadband, even with the NBN supposedly rolling through their communities. The government boasts about the speed of its rollout. It's like boasting about rolling out a new highway with the potholes already built in. Hundreds of properties are being left behind during the rollout, like pimples on a face, and not being connected, because they are deemed too difficult or unserviceable. This is happening in places like Dodges Ferry and Brighton, which are technically regional but are less than 40 kilometres from Hobart's CBD. These are fast-growing communities that deserve better broadband. Homeowners are being told they can't get connected, but their neighbours can. They're not given any indication about when NBN will be back. For some the wait has already been months and could drag on for years. Meanwhile these folk either have to put up with the old ADSL, if it's there, or stump up for mobile data, assuming their mobile coverage is adequate. These people are victims of this government's obsession with spin over substance. It's more interested in the speed of the rollout than the quality of the rollout.

Take Shaun, for example, a network engineer who lives in Pontville, within the Brighton Council. Pontville is a compact town less than 40 kilometres from the Hobart CBD and less than five kilometres from the thriving and quickly growing centre of Brighton. Shaun first contacted me in August last year. NBN Co would have you believe its rollout for Shaun's area is completed, but it's not. There are four streets with no connection, including Shaun's home. The infrastructure is in place, but NBN Co advises there will be no connection to the area at Shaun's property until later this year, nearly a year since he first got in touch. NBN Co could have connected Shaun and his neighbours, but that may have slowed down their rollout to easier addresses and interfered with the government's agenda for a good news headline. NBN Co is under pressure from this government to connect 90 per cent of properties to the NBN in every area where the rollout is occurring—but too bad if you're in the expendable 10 per cent! I've had almost continuous contact with NBN Co about Shaun's issue, and the conversation does not change. Apart from saying it is meeting its 90 per cent connection target, it refuses to concede any other point.

If we travel further into my electorate, to the Central Highlands community of Miena, we can see even more evidence of the appalling infrastructure that is being rolled out by this government. Miena is remote. It has a static population of around 60 people, which swells to thousands during summer and over long weekends, when shack owners and tourists flock to the area. The current fixed wireless NBN in Miena is pretty ordinary, and the area is prone to blackouts, which is not great when you're surrounded by bush which is prone to fire, and your new NBN service means that when the power goes out so does your phone. It's usually the case that when the NBN rolls through they turn off your old phone, but what's little known is that in fixed wireless and satellite areas you can ask for your old phone to stay on, connected to the exchange. Margaret in my office discovered this and relayed that to the people of Miena, and you could hear from hundreds of kilometres away the sighs of relief that they could access their phones when the power was out. I must give a shout-out here to NBN Co's man in Tasmania, Russell Kelly, and to Telstra, who both acted quickly and cooperatively to ensure that the people of Miena did get to keep their phone connections with a minimum of fuss.

Further north in Lyons—it's a big electorate: 30,000 square kilometres—in the township of Westbury, another of my constituents, Graeme, was advised by NBN Co that he could connect to the network, and, acting on this advice, he signed up to receive the NBN. (Time expired)

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