Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Cyber Security and Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I also commend the member for Mallee for that riveting contribution because men are quite often in denial about their health, and so I encourage them to take advantage of the awareness campaigns for Men's Health Week.

I am here tonight to talk about NBN and the lack thereof, or the lack thereof of service. I got a letter last week from Rudi in Pearce who said:

We signed up to NBN last October. For a while it seemed to work well, then one by one the wheels fell off and I live to regret the decision.

The first regret was that our back-to-base alarm system wouldn't work with the NBN. We had to get an entirely new system that was wireless.

The next regret was the loss of facsimile services. They won't work with the NBN either. Our perfectly good fax machine went to the tip.

Then, early in 2018, we started to get outages—every day for lengthy periods.

Rudi got in touch with the Telstra fault line.

The Telstra fault line goes direct to their offshore call centre/s, and we always got the same response—very sorry but don't worry. We'll fix it for you.

I started documenting the outages—four or five every day and for many hours at times

…   …   …

Telstra sent a technician to the house. He fiddled and snipped at some ancient wiring but that didn't help for long.

…   …   …

Telstra then said they'd get an NBN technician to come to the house.

Three appointments were made, no-one came, no-one did the courtesy of phoning us.

At the fourth appointment a technician finally turned up, grumbling about the nonsense of trying to connect 21st century technology to ancient copper wiring.

I'm with the technician: 21st century technology and ancient copper wiring do not mix; they do not work together.

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