Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The rollout of the National Broadband Network in my electorate and the Hunter region broadly has had serious problems. In recent months my office has been inundated with complaints from people attempting to connect to the NBN or who have been unexpectedly disconnected as part of the rollout. In many cases people have been left for weeks without a service, including a telephone line. It is not an overstatement to say that lives are at risk as a result.

I have been contacted by several elderly and sick constituents, particularly in the Edgeworth area, who depend on phone based medical alert systems but who have been put at risk as a result of their phone lines being disconnected. These residents did not ask to be switched to the NBN; they were unexpectedly disconnected when work was completed on nodes in their area. I am assured that the procedural fault which caused these disconnections has been identified by nbn, but I am far from satisfied that the behaviour of service providers following these incidents was adequate.

Retail providers are responsible for ensuring that they provide services to their customers. This includes adherence to the universal service obligation for telephone services. However in many instances, I am told, this service was not offered to affected customers and of course this does not extend to the provision of internet services.

Worse, it appears some providers have used the disconnection as an opportunity to offer inappropriate NBN packages to their customers. I have heard from elderly residents who have been sold tablet devices despite having no idea how to use them, who have been offered large data plans despite their internet usage being minimal and who have been sent self-install modem systems with little instruction on how to connect them. All they asked for was a phone!

I have heard of the difficulties in obtaining an NBN connection—appointments were cancelled with no explanation, or technicians simply did not attend when scheduled to. If a technician does arrive, I am told they often leave without work being completed because of the overly complex system of deferral for infrastructure repair and maintenance, or because skilled technicians were not contracted to do the work in the first place. I have heard from one business owner who was left without a phone service for around six weeks over Christmas and who took to sleeping in his store at night to protect his stock, which is worth more than $1 million, because it was vulnerable to theft as a result of inactive phone based alarm systems. This is in addition to the lost business from clients being unable to contact the store by telephone during the peak sales season. Both he and my staff spent numerous hours liaising with his provider and the NBN, and only after three separate visits from technicians was responsibility assigned and the fault fixed.

For those lucky enough to be connected, I am told speeds can be lacklustre and supply is intermittent. I have heard from residents who now have speeds slower than ADSL or even dial-up connections. Just imagine it: the National Broadband Network delivering speeds slower than dial-up. Others have patchy service once connected. One resident, who has a pacemaker and relies on an internet connection for his specialist to monitor his progress, had his service interrupted for a number of weeks after switching to the NBN.

We all know that making a complaint to a retail provider is a frustrating experience, but as these companies struggle with a veritable tidal wave of complaints, this process is being exacerbated. It is not uncommon for people to call my office in tears or enraged by their experience. The end result is a blame game. We know some RSPs are not obtaining adequate capacity to service their customers but, as the Newcastle Herald reported last week, provider iiNet also cites outdated infrastructure at the exchange as a reason for slow speeds.

For the record, I have advocated for better broadband services for residents in my area irrespective of the technology. Ours is an area plagued by pair gains and premises located too far from an exchange for service. While I always said that the Liberals' fibre-to-the-node network is inferior to Labor's program, I welcomed it because it promised better internet speeds for residents, homes and businesses in my region. This is no longer true. On all aspects of the rollout the government has failed: inferior technology, a lack of regulation and massive cost blow-outs are not good enough for the people I represent. Malcolm's Turnbull's second-rate copper NBN is not good enough for the Hunter. It is incompetence on a grand scale. I call on the Prime Minister to address the problems with the NBN rollout urgently. During every street stall I run, every doorknocking session I do, every mobile office I hold NBN is always raised. The slow speeds, the wait for connections and the dropping out of phone lines must be fixed, otherwise the fundamental promise that this government was elected on—an NBN delivered faster than the Labor government's—will be an utter and complete failure. (Time expired)