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

It is a great pleasure to contribute to the debate today on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer) Bill 2017. I want to build on some of the comments the member for Indi has made. She is an incredibly passionate advocate for her community, as all of us in this chamber understand and acknowledge. She is talking about potential here, and that just frustrates me in this debate about the National Broadband Network, because in the electorate of the member for Indi and in the electorates of other members in this House, and certainly in my electorate, we know that we have businesses and innovative, smart people—scientists—who could be doing so much more, who could be taking their innovation and their knowledge right out to the farthest corners of the globe, but they're stymied, and it is frustrating. Deputy Speaker, I'm sure you experience this in your community when you talk to people there. I've spent a lot of time talking to farmers on this issue, and they tell you they could build much better and bigger businesses, but they can't upload receipts onto their computers so that they can pay their bills. I've talked to farmers who actually have to get up in the middle of the night to do their accounting, because that's the only time at which their internet will work fast enough for them to download the things they need for doing their accounting. Every time I engage in this debate about NBN, it is always in the context of missed opportunities. I'm happy to have a discussion today about some of the technical things. As the member for Indi said, we are talking about pretty basic standard services here.

It's disappointing for Labor MPs and other MPs to engage in this debate, because we know what could have been. The truth is that Labor had a better plan for this. That plan would have delivered fibre to the home to 93 per cent of Australians. That plan was going to cost a lot of money—no-one can deny that. I would point out that the coalition's plan—their half-baked effort—has cost a lot of money, too. Labor's plan would have cost a lot of money and it would have taken a long time to do, but, as our friend Tony Windsor says, 'You do it once, you do it properly, you do it with fibre.' We had a plan that would be coming to completion right now, and all of my constituents and almost all of the member for Indi's constituents—I'm assuming, as it depends on whether the satellite was going to be connected to her area—would have had a broadband connection. That broadband connection would have had a fundamental difference to the coalition's plan in the way it has connected Australians up to broadband—that is, it would have been futureproof.

We know that when we lay fibre under the ground we can continue to upgrade the technology that sits at either end, the technical electronics that help us to connect to the internet, but fibre is what's needed as a starting point. That's what we've missed out on. That's why the member for Indi's constituents, the member for Chifley's constituents and my constituents are not able to build the innovative businesses they could, because they are struggling with an internet that frankly is just not good enough for a First World country like Australia.

We are here to talk about some of the technical aspects of how the NBN is being regulated. I will go those issues, which are in the context of this extraordinarily frustrating public discussion on where we have ended up with a second-rate NBN. I feel that not a week goes by in which another scandal or another issue does not come up, whether it be about the fact that speeds are lower than expected, that the internet is more expensive or that it is less reliable. A lot of people in my community—and I will speak about their experiences specifically—are telling me that after signing onto the NBN they have an internet service today that is more expensive, less reliable and slower than it was when they had an ADSL connection. It's pretty frustrating.

I want to mention a recent report that I found incredibly disturbing. There are organisations that rank internet speeds around the world. The last report from one organisation, Speedtest, found that Australia has dropped to 55th in its global ranking of internet speeds. This is an incredible report and I would encourage those of you listening to look at it. The report lists countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Barbados, Thailand, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Moldova, Estonia, Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine and Uruguay—I could list 56 countries before I get to Australia. We have an average download speed of 29.5 megabits per second. The fastest country in the world is Singapore, which has an average download speed of 174.94 megabits per second.

Mr Deputy Speaker, it is not a mystery as to why we are 56th in the world and Singapore is No. 1. Those of us who have been following this debate will be able to tell you why Singapore has a high internet download speed, and that is that Singaporean residences have fibre to the home. It is a real illustration of how badly wrong we have got this. We are seeing that the countries in the world that made the big one-off investment up-front in building fibre to the home are the countries that are leading the world in internet speeds, while the system that we've cobbled together with the different mix of technologies and the 'one street with one type of technology and the next street with another' approach is seeing us decline. We are getting worse over time, not better. There are all the other issues that I've talked about, as well as the expense and the issues around reliability.

I will speak briefly about the Statutory Infrastructure Provider scheme. The bill that is before us goes into a bit of detail about some changes that will be made. I've talked a lot about the government's failures on the National Broadband Network, but I'm happy to admit when the government gets something right. It's not all that often that I have to make that concession, so I'm happy to do so now.

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