Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity to put on the record today the great distress and disappointment of tens of thousands of people across my electorate—from the young to the very old—who have heard this week that it will be at least 2016 before they even find out what form of technology this government will be rolling out under the National Broadband Network across our region or when, indeed, it will even start in their area. This is particularly disappointing and frustrating for them because many of these suburbs have very poor broadband access now. When the current minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said just over a year ago that addressing underserviced areas would be a priority for the new government's rollout, they had anticipated that that might be the case for them, and it has not been.

So I would indicate that suburbs across my region have been contacting me for quite a while now, in particular the area of Bundeena, which is at the very northern end, and many of the suburbs along the escarpment at the north of my electorate, because the topography is quite challenging anyway, and parts of areas like Figtree which currently have to rely on very, very poor broadband, if any. They are not even on the current rollout that was announced this week. They have poor broadband now. They were anticipating they would be prioritised. Now they have found out that they will not be. They are pretty cranky about it, and I understand why.

For many of us, as we would know—and I know my colleague the member for Ryan and I went around the country with the standing committee, hearing about the important role that broadband plays for households, small businesses, home-based businesses and students studying—it is not just about the speed of the download, which is also a disappointment given that the government made commitments that there would be a minimum download speed of 25 megabits, and that is not going to be achieved. It is also about the upload capacity. If you are running a small business from home and you need to be sending files, you need not only speed but reliability in order to achieve that. It is also about the fact that if they are ending up with this new technology, which will be fibre to the node, they are going to face the real problem we face every time it rains in our region. You are relying on the copper for the last section still. It drops out. It is unreliable. The frustrations will not be improved by running fibre to the corner of the street. So I would implore the minister to have another look at the suburbs across the Illawarra which have very poor quality broadband now. They wanted Labor's broadband, but at least, if they are going to get the second-rate one, it should be prioritised for those areas that have underservicing already.