Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm so pleased to be speaking to the National Broadband Network Companies Amendment (Commitment to Public Ownership) Bill 2024, a bill that is all about making sure the NBN stays in public hands. We do not want to repeat the mistakes that were made with Telstra, which have led to my community really having to fight for what should be a right—that is, decent quality communications. It's the same with the NBN.

I want to take everybody back—a few decades, actually—to the 1990s and Paul Keating's Creative Nation, because Creative Nation turned out to be my awakening to why we need high-speed broadband. I'll tell you why. Creative Nation had one aspect to it which was all about encouraging people to create digital content. The language might have been slightly different—I think we called it multimedia—but it was all about creating things that would be delivered through the internet at a time when the internet was still a very new beast.

There were several multimedia enterprise centres, and one of those was in Eveleigh. I had the privilege of working with IT people for the first time. My business partner and I were the media training content, and we worked with artist and designers to create a multimedia program that would be delivered through the internet. It was a long process, and we all learnt a lot. The culmination of it was that my business was named as the creator of the best multimedia education product in the country, and I'm very proud of that.

It was the early 2000s by the time we got to this point, and it was not possible to commercialise the product that we'd spent several years creating because there was no way of delivering it to people through the internet. The speeds were not fast enough. We were still dialling up or had just switched across to ADSL. That was the first time as a businessperson that I hit a wall, which was a failure to have invested in high-speed broadband at that point. That was, for me, a real wake-up. I don't profess to be a savvy IT person, but I do know that when my business is constrained by something, I want to see solutions to it.

It took some time before a solution was presented, and when Kevin Rudd announced that there would be this national broadband network of high-speed broadband—with video and audio, where you could have interactivity and animations could be accommodated—and he was talking about it benefiting people, I knew exactly the sort of people who would benefit. They were people with businesses like mine with great IP and no method of delivering it effectively through the internet. So I have been a convert to the NBN from those very early days, and I knew very strongly what it was to be able to turn that NBN on. I was lucky enough that, though I had lost an election, my community was one of the early beneficiaries. I remember with the now Prime Minister pushing the button in Windsor to turn on, metaphorically, the NBN in the Hawkesbury, one of the first places that it was rolled out—to parts of the Hawkesbury. So I have followed really closely the rolling out of the NBN. I have despaired at some of the pace of it.

When the Liberal government came to power and they turned a 21st century technology into a historic copper lead technology, I was really concerned about the economic and social impacts that would have on people. I was also horrified to hear the Liberal government declare that the NBN was done. The rollout was done. It was completed. It was finished. To hear it declared complete was to hear them signal, 'Our job is done, and there's no need for us to try and continue to improve the NBN that's available for people.' I know that, in spite of a significant number of people having fibre, many people only had it to the curb, or they only had it to a node, or, even worse, they had satellite or wireless. The Liberal government said that it was complete, but it was certainly not my experience in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury that this thing had been finished. And it's not finished yet. There is still more to do. What that decision by those opposite did was really signal their intent that it was ready to sell off—that this essential infrastructure, sometimes the only infrastructure still standing when natural disasters hit, could be sold off to the highest bidder.

Let's just think about how essential the National Broadband Network is. If you didn't realise beforehand how essential it was, you certainly realised during COVID. What we all recognised then was that we needed this, whether we were a child studying with a bunch of 10-year-olds, whether we were a teenager or in our early 20s at university or whether we were adults working from home and trying to keep connected with our colleagues. For every demographic—and that includes people like my mum who really rely on access to data, not just, as Prime Minister Turnbull once said, to watch lots of movies. She certainly doesn't have five movies playing in her house at the one time. We were told that the only reason you'd need high-speed broadband is if that were happening. She needs secure, reliable, trustworthy technology that's not going to go out in a storm.

For people in the lower Blue Mountains in particular, we faced the issue of having boxes that, when there was a storm, would just self-combust, essentially. Sometimes they literally left little burn trails; other times they just died. It took a long time for the previous government to acknowledge that this was a problem, partly because the lower Blue Mountains community is one of the most storm prone in the country when you look at the geology that explains it, I'm told. To have systems for people to be told, 'That's good enough. That is all you deserve. That'll do you,' my community very clearly said, 'No, it is not good enough.' From there, we've seen the benefits of high-speed broadband for health and telehealth, and those benefits will continue to be experienced as we go forward. As for small business, I think small business now would wonder how it would survive without a decent broadband service.

The gold star is obviously fibre to the home. In the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury and even a lot of other parts of Western Sydney, there are still places where we're having to fix up the mess of fibre to the curb and fibre to the node.

I recently was up in Blackheath. It has been a really long, slow wait for Blackheath and other areas. Back in 2017, before we were in government, the then shadow minister for communications was up there with me and we heard why they were felt they were being shortchanged by the Liberals fibre-to-the-node rollout, which relied on old copper to do the connection into your home from a box somewhere down your street. But finally there is a rollout happening that is shifting that fibre to the node to fibre to the curb, and I have never been so delighted to see streets being dug up as I was in Blackheath, watching that rollout happen.

What I also noticed, having followed the rollout from its very first days around Bligh Park, is the degree of skill that's involved. We've learnt so much and our operators have learnt so much about how to do this neatly, how to do it effectively and how to do it quickly. That was a real delight to see.

We're upgrading the NBN because we believe people should continue to see improvements in their service, if they don't have a gold-plated service. This will mean that around 3,000 people living in homes in the Hawkesbury region—everywhere from McGraths Hill, Kurrajong Heights, North Richmond, Pitt Town, Vineyard to Freemans Reach—will shift from fibre to the node to fibre to the premises. They'll have fibre coming all the way into their homes. In the Blue Mountains about 14,000 more households will have access to what they should have had in the first place—quality fibre. That's everywhere from Hazelbrook right up the mountains to Mount Victoria.

But there is still work to be done, and that's why it's so important that the NBN is kept in public hands. There's more to do to make sure it stays affordable for people in the future. The consequence of privatisation, as we know, is that shareholders needs are put ahead of everybody else's, and that has terrible consequences for us as a society, as a community and as an economy.

In an electorate like mine—we have areas that are not just peri-urban but the equivalent of regional, the equivalent of rural and even the equivalent of remote—there are ongoing challenges in getting the very best standard of NBN. I've got people on satellite and wireless. My view is that we should continue to be looking to deliver a higher quality of service to those people, and that will only happen if the NBN stays in public hands. From my perspective it is not over for those people. I am never one to shy away from advocating for my community, and I absolutely understand the needs that people have in those areas, particularly where fibre comes down a street but stops halfway down just because someone drew a line on the map in the original design. So there are lots of areas where I will continue fighting and advocating for an expansion of fibre for my community.

Labor founded the National Broadband Network. We founded it to provide fast, reliable, affordable broadband to all Australians—not just to some, not just to the lucky ones who live in a densely populated area, but to all Australians. We are delivering our vision for a world-class fibre network, and the difference between a couple of years ago and now is stark in my community. For a start, I get to have fibre to my premises. My entire street, the entire suburb of Winmalee, the entire lower Blue Mountains can now say, 'Yes, I'd like to get that fibre to the curb to come all the way into my home.' It only happens when you have a government that has a commitment to genuinely trying to level the playing field for every Australian business and for every Australian no matter where they live. Only by keeping the NBN in government ownership can we continue to deliver on that vision. That's why this legislation is here. That's why we're here, on our side, arguing that we need to secure, in legislation, the future of the NBN and make sure it remains in public ownership.

This is a critical infrastructure. It reaches over 12.4 million premises across Australia. Currently, more than 8.6 million homes and businesses are connected; that is a lot of people whose lives are affected. Keeping NBN in public hands will ensure that the company itself has the certainty necessary for its investment planning and for all that operational decision-making needed to maximise the economic and social benefits of the NBN, and ongoing government ownership of the NBN will help keep the those wholesale broadband prices more affordable for consumers than if the company was in private ownership.

What we should have going forward is the opposite of what happened to my business in the early 2000s. We should not have business owners say, 'I cannot do my business because I am constrained by the NBN,' or, 'I am constrained by lack of capacity to be able to send things through this magic thing of the internet.' Every business, every home, every older person, every child should have the same access and the same ability to use this infrastructure. It is crucial public infrastructure and should never be sold off. Just as telephones should never have been sold off, particularly when we did not know how technology was going to evolve—and we ended up with a situation where there is inequity in that system now—nor should the NBN. The NBN should stay in public hands now and forever.

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