Emma McBride (Dobell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The NBN should be supporting businesses and boosting jobs on the Central Coast and across Australia, but in too many cases it's letting them down. I have heard too many stories of blame-shifting and breakdowns in communication between the NBN service providers, and for small businesses this is costing them. I have been working with a holiday park in my electorate that is around $50,000 out of pocket because of an NBN fault. The business has experienced multiple ongoing outages since a lightning strike earlier this year. During the first outage it was 16 days before lines were restored. Fortunately, to calculate the compensation, their insurer covered the significant financial losses using a method based on lost bookings, the opportunity for future bookings, reputational damage and time invested in coordinating the reconnection of services.

How did the NBN fix this fault? By moving the damaged service lines to other lines that worked. That's all they did—at least until an NBN technician, without authorisation from the customer, disconnected the line several months later. This led to an outage that lasted 42 days. The business's losses were significant. They had just invested in a school holiday advertising campaign, but nobody could get through to make a booking. Bookings were down 60 per cent. The difference in takings compared to the previous year was around $50,000.

Insurance won't cover the loss, because the outage was not caused directly by a weather event. Their service provider has offered $3,000 compensation. This won't even cover the accountant's fees to prepare the documents to claim the refund. The business owners believe the insurance model is more reasonable. They tell me that using this method their compensation would be at least around $20,000. An appeal to the ombudsperson is unlikely to help. They have been told the service provider's compensation model is generally accepted. It is clear this business has suffered as a result of this outage. Why did it take the NBN 42 days to fix it?

The arrangement between NBN and service providers is failing customers. This business owner made over 100 individual phone calls to their provider but never once could they speak to the organisation that caused and could fix the outage: NBN. This is not an isolated example. There are many other examples in my electorate alone. My office has handled almost 500 individual NBN complaints in the last two years. This government is failing businesses on the Central Coast with the NBN rollout, with redundant technology, their lack of oversight of service providers and their failure to make NBN accountable for fixing, maintaining and upgrading their network in a timely way. The NBN should have been a game-changer. It should have turned things around for small businesses in regional communities like mine. It hasn't. The NBN is broken. It must be fixed.

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