Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In recent months, my office has received phone calls and emails from Moreton locals wanting to know what is going on with this Turnbull-Joyce government NBN. Under the last Labor government, southsiders—in fact, all Australians—could easily go to the NBN's website and find out when the NBN rollout would begin in their suburb. For many Moreton suburbs, that's supposed to have already happened.

Even putting aside the substantial delay and blow-out in costs under Prime Minister Turnbull's leadership, there's a more pressing problem for Moreton. Well over three quarters of my electorate was set to receive a technology called hybrid fibre coaxial, which uses old cables built in the 1990s by Telstra and Optus. But here's where it gets crazy. Just like something out of an episode of Veep or The Thick of It, the HFC rollout has been delayed again because it doesn't work. That's right, the second-rate NBN coming to Moreton is being delayed further because Prime Minister Turnbull can't give us a technology that actually works.

From Sunnybank to Annerley, Tarragindi to Chelmer and Eight Mile Plains to Oxley, Moreton, a suburban Brisbane electorate, will be trapped in an internet backwater. Prime Minister Turnbull is creating a digital divide in Moreton. Some lucky Brisbane locals, under the last Labor government, already had fibre to the premises rolled out to their suburb. But in Moreton we've got the NBN—the internet network of the future relying on centuries-old copper wire or decades-old cables built by Telstra and Optus. The fact is that under Labor all of Moreton was scheduled to get the world-class fibre-to-the-premises NBN, delivering super-fast internet speeds using fibre optic cable.