Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll just start off by saying that, on this side of the House, for a very long time now—in fact, well over seven years—we've been saying one thing, and we're continuing to say it, and you would have heard it today: do it once, do it right and do it with fibre. That was the correct way that this should have been done. That was the way that we promised in 2013 that we would roll out the NBN, with fibre to the node to every household in Australia.

Back in 2013, we remember the then Abbott government, together with Mr Turnbull, and the hoo-ha at their favourite News Corp outlet—Sky channel I think it was—when they did their announcement on NBN. Most of us would remember the holograms and the hoo-ha that went along with it absolutely saying that Labor had it wrong and they had it right. Well, in the last week or so, they have been proven wrong. We know for the last seven years the government have continued to tell the Australian public that their version of substandard NBN was the best deal for Australians. That's just simply not the case. The government have continuously flogged these old technologies for the NBN. As the member for Parramatta said, in places around Australia during COVID this past year, when people have had to work from home, we found out about the inadequacies of the NBN.

I too, in my electorate of Adelaide, had constituents ringing me who had to go on shift in their households so the kids could do their homework and the parents could do their work from home because, if you got two people on the computer, it wasn't downloading or it was so slow. It is not right in 2021 to still have these issues taking place. It's been a very costly and unnecessary mistake by this government.

Let's take a look at the range of bungles that have taken place. They promised that every Australian would have access to minimum speeds of 25 megabits per second by 2016. Well, we're in 2021 now, five years on. That was their commitment to the Australian people. That was a promise that they made during the election campaign, and people may have voted for them because of that particular commitment and promise. They haven't upheld that promise. We're now, as I said, in 2021, five years on, and these minimum speeds are still not being delivered over the copper NBN network. According to reports, 238,000 households still cannot access minimum speeds. It is unacceptable in a modern country, in a country that wants to pride itself on its IT technology, that we cannot access these minimum speeds.

Now we hear that some of the hardware that they have used could actually be dangerous. There have been reports from around the country that fibre-to-the-curb modems on the NBN have been literally getting fried during lightning storms. We have heard that some households have required up to six modem replacements, with technicians having to visit each and every time. If storms can blow up six consecutive NBN modems then something is clearly not right. They may try to blame it on renewables, as they did when South Australia had the most horrendous and worst storms it had ever had. We didn't have electricity for a few days, and they tried to blame it on renewables. Maybe they'll do the same with this. I was expecting it, but they didn't.

In another recent debacle, NBN Co has apparently run out of modems for their problem-plagued HFC network. The modem is a pretty essential bit of equipment when you're rolling out a national broadband network, most people would think. But they announced they will halt the activation of the new HFC network for several months because the HFC networks that the government purchased are not fit for purpose. Deputy Speaker, can you see the pattern of behaviour here? They spent $57 billion on a network and ran out of modems. Perhaps the answer is a financial mismanagement on the part of the government. The government announced in 2013 that their second-rate version of the NBN would be delivered for $29.5 billion. The cost then blew out to $41 billion and it continued to go up— (Time expired)

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