Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I did have a little bit of a chuckle to myself when I saw this motion pop up. Those who've been in this place for a while would know that this isn't actually a new motion. This motion has been moved by former government members several times. They've just recycled a little bit of old homework, deleting 'government' and putting in 'opposition'. They're trying to rewrite history again with this motion.

When the former Rudd-Gillard government first decided that it would build the NBN network, the plan was for the majority of Australian households—in fact, over 93 per cent of Australian households—to get fibre to the premises. That was the plan. That was what was being rolled out. Unfortunately, that Labor government lost power in 2013 before the real significant build started. What we then had from the incoming coalition government was a debacle.

Back then, Malcolm Turnbull became Minister for Communications and tore up the plan which would have seen 93-plus per cent of households get fibre to the premises. They introduced their mixed plan, where they had fibre to the node, they used a cable, they had more houses on satellite and they had more houses on the fixed wireless network. They promised that it would be built and people would be on the NBN sooner, faster and cheaper, by 2016, but they failed. They failed to build it sooner, failed to make it cheaper and failed in it altogether.

In fact, under the former government we saw, as strange as this sounds, manufacturing facilities overseas having to ramp up their production capacity for copper wire because, rather than replacing old, degraded copper that was in the ground with fibre optics as the rest of the world were doing, the former government decided—because they were so wedded to their fibre-to-the-node plan—that, where there was degraded copper, they needed new copper. So much copper was required that overseas manufacturers had to reopen factories. That's how out of date the former government's policy was.

In my own electorate, a regional electorate, a whole bunch of towers were built when Julia Gillard was Prime Minister. That's how long ago these towers were built. But then the coalition was elected on 7 September 2013. These towers weren't turned on. They were put in the too-hard basket. Yet the government hadn't informed the other side of the business—the retailers—that the towers hadn't been turned on. So we started to get these complaints coming in. This is an example of how incompetent the previous government were. People were being sold a product that they could attach to the NBN through the fixed wireless network. Only when the technician came out did they discover that in their area the tower had not been switched on, and it took forever to get to the bottom of why these towers hadn't been switched on. So we had the frustration of people who were trying to buy internet access—buy their NBN package—but couldn't because the tower wasn't switched on. We found out that one of the towers had been rejected through planning. The solution of the government back then was to fix the nine towers in the area back to one relay tower, when it was supposed to be five towers to one relay tower. It meant that the people at the very end of the service got poor-quality internet. They had very slow speeds. This is the legacy of that government, and mine is just one electorate. Every electorate has a horror-story track record of the previous government and what they did to what was going to be a revolutionary change that would get every house the internet speeds that it needed.

What the new Labor government did for those fixed wireless networks on coming into government has increased the speeds. One of the first acts of the minister, Michelle Rowland, was to increase the speeds for regional communities who rely upon the fixed wireless network. It's been fantastic for people relying on that service, whether they be students who are studying from home or people working from home. They are now getting the download speeds that they were promised. But it took the election of a Labor government to fix. We are rolling out more fibre to the-premises. We can't roll it out everywhere, but we're rolling it out where we can because fibre is better than copper, something that took the previous government almost a decade to work out and this government to fix. As for this motion, I strongly suggest that the opposition go back and start again.

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