Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In December 2017, Blaxland resident Tony Kleu contacted me to complain about a delay to the NBN rollout in his street. A freelance journalist who really depends on fast internet for his work, he'd been expecting to connect to the NBN by the middle of 2018, but out of the blue the NBN website had rescheduled his connection to mid-2019. At the time, NBN Co apologised for what they called a glitch in their website and gave assurances that they'd fix the glitch. It turns out it was a glitch—a really big glitch—but the glitch was not that the website was wrong in promising NBN by the middle of 2019, and the NBN certainly didn't get connected in 2018. Tony called me this week to say that the rollout for the NBN for his street is now April to June 2020.

Now, I know that NBN Co has hit some unexpected technical issues as it rolls out through the Blue Mountains, but, if the government had tasked NBN to do this right over the last six years, they would have had boots on the ground and been aware of these problems long ago. When I moved back into my Winmalee home in March last year, we were told to expect NBN connection within a couple of months, just as Yellow Rock and Hawkesbury Heights were. Nope; it didn't happen. We are now scheduled for the end of this year; but, of course, we'll believe that when we stop buffering! And Faulconbridge, Sun Valley, Warrimoo and parts of Springwood and Blaxland are now scheduled for some time in the first half of 2020.

The impacts of this are far reaching. One of my constituents from Winmalee was likely to lose her job because the delay in the rollout meant her home didn't have the technical capacity for her to do the job. I don't see how the government can pretend to be supporters of small business or self-employment when so many of the people are telling me the problems that NBN is causing them. Anthony Gerber of GuruNow runs a livestreaming internet business from his home in the lower Blue Mountains and has been counting down to NBN being available by the end of this year. He's a start-up with an innovative way to use technology—exactly the sort of business that we know high-speed broadband would enable—but his business growth is constrained because of delays in the NBN, and Anthony's outraged that this week he's learned it's now delayed a further six months with no notice. The same thing happened last year. He was given a 21 September 2018 connection date only for it to be moved a year again at the last minute.

This is not a way to support small business. This is, though, what small business is experiencing right across Macquarie. In places like Bowen Mountain residents are facing the same thing: poor landlines, slow or no ADSL and a fob-off from the telcos that 'You'll get NBN soon.' So there is no requirement by them to upgrade communications. It's like being strung along with the 'cheque's in the mail' promise from creditors. (Time expired)