Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My electorate of Blair in South-East Queensland is over 6,400 square kilometres and takes in most of Ipswich and all of the Somerset region to the north and west—country towns such as Kilcoy, Toogoolawah, Moore, Coominya, Esk, Lowood, Fernvale and Minden. I do mobile offices across this region on a regular basis. Most of the small towns in this region are supporting primary industries across the area. These towns and the people in these towns are resilient. They face hardships like the floods of 2011 and 2013, and like droughts. And there are the severe storms which racked Fernvale in the last few years.

The people and businesses in the Somerset region have been delivered a delayed, substandard fibre-to-the-node national broadband technology. As I travel around the region, I get complaints again and again. Recently in Coominya and Lowood, I was inundated by constituents who were lined up to speak to me about this issue. I hear from businesses that they are falling behind because they can't get access to the technology they need. And there are more businesses in these country towns that are not in their high streets; they're people in their places of residence running businesses from home.

Elderly residents with serious and ongoing medical conditions can't get access to online health services consistently. People are often isolated from their families. These country towns are isolated when there are floods. Also, the children in the Somerset region deserve every opportunity—the same as kids in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane—in terms of their education. They need access to digital technology in classrooms and online resources made possible with reliable broadband connections, and that's simply not happening. The multi-technology mix has increased in cost from $29.5 billion to $49 billion. There is more exposure to wireless competition and there will be higher costs over the lifetime of the NBN. It delivers slower speeds. There's less reliable service. Consumer complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman have hit record highs, and we've had the NBN executives confirm recently that the 30-year business case doesn't set aside any funding for upgrading the copper network, which gets flooded and damaged during floods. We saw that in 2011 and 2013.

This multi-technology mix is a real mess. It is a complete shemozzle. It's affecting businesses, farmers, children and agribusiness in the Somerset region. I'm doing what my constituents want me to do. They asked me to raise this issue in parliament. I'm doing it today in relation to this matter. We've also seen the HFC rollout to two million premises halted because of four years of cost blowouts and delays. The technology doesn't work reliably. This is a complete disaster and the government should look again at what they should be doing.