Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For the love of all things sacred, members on this side of the House are calling on the government to do something to help users of the NBN who are paying for a product that they are simply not getting. On a weekly basis, we hear stories that people are paying for a 12 megabit per second product and they are not getting five megs. They are paying for a 50-meg service and they are not getting 25 megs. They are paying for a 100-meg service and they are not getting a fraction of this.

The tragic thing is that the government has the power to do something about this but it simply refuses. It could, for example, require that the NBN tell the service providers where the impediments are in the network and where they cannot be delivering these standard products. It could require the telecommunications companies to tell the customers, when they ask for a product that they cannot deliver, exactly what the problems are in the network. Of course, the problem with doing this is it is going to shine a big spotlight on the hopeless mess that is this government's and this Prime Minister's National Broadband Network. It takes a special brand of genius to spend $50 billion to deliver a poorer network.

Of course, the Prime Minister has a conflict of interest in this. Before the last election, he sold the electorate a product that he could not deliver himself. It was himself, and the people want their money back.