Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to further highlight some of the issues being experienced by my electorate following the commencement of the National Broadband Network rollout. Malcolm Turnbull calls this second-rate NBN the MTM, the multi-technology mix. A better name, however, is 'Malcolm Turnbull's Mess'. The rollout is in a perilous state, with many issues needing the government's urgent attention. When the Abbott-Turnbull government was elected in 2013, the entire Newcastle electorate was on the rollout map for Labor's super-fast, reliable, fibre-to-the-premises NBN rollout. Not long after, we were wiped off the map entirely before being re-added, suburb by suburb, mostly to the flawed fibre-to-the-node network. Whilst recognising that fibre to the home was the best technology and should be rolled out across the country, as Labor had planned, many pragmatic Novocastrians had at least thought that being on the rollout map to receive some sort of NBN would be a good thing. Speeds would not be the fastest available, but fibre to the node promised to be about three times as fast as their existing ADSL service when first connected.

Unfortunately, these pragmatic Novocastrians have been majorly let down by the Turnbull government's fibre-to-the-node rollout. Here is a typical example of what my constituents are experiencing. Simon from Merewether hooked up to the NBN just a few weeks ago, in early February. He used to get an average of about eight megabytes per second download speed on his old ADSL broadband service. The NBN was made available to his residence and he signed up to the fastest speed available as soon as he could, a 100-megabyte-per-second plan. What speed is he actually getting now on his NBN? When he is home from work and able to use the internet, after 4 pm, he now gets 1.5 to three megabytes per second, less than half the speed he used to get under his old ADSL. Then there are those who have chosen not to hook up to the NBN at all, having been put off by the shocking media reports of disconnections and slow speeds. The trouble for them is that they are getting disconnected from their service willy-nilly anyway. My office is receiving complaints every day from aggrieved residents, many elderly and heavily reliant on their home phones for emergency purposes, whose phone lines and broadband connections are being disconnected with no warning or notice. Many have been left without a service for up to three weeks. So not only is the NBN itself a massive failure; those trying to live their lives separate from Malcolm Turnbull's mess are nonetheless being taken out as collateral damage.

Malcolm Turnbull's second-rate NBN is an absolute mess. First Malcolm Turnbull doubled the cost from $29.5 billion to $56 billion; then he pushed the time frames to get the NBN to all Australians out. In media reports this morning, a leaked report shows that construction is well behind schedule and costs are spiralling upwards. It is not good enough and blame lays squarely at the feet of Malcolm Turnbull. (Time expired)