Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm proud to stand here today to talk about the recent changes to Sky Muster because finally residents of McEwen, who were let down by the previous government and left without cable internet, are getting better NBN services. Since 1 June, these people have been able to use uncapped satellite broadband services for the first time. The new Sky Muster Plus Premium service will provide almost 4,500 customers in McEwen with unmetered data 24 hours a day and with fastest speeds of up to 100 megabits per second. In our communities, we will finally be able to access fast, reliable and affordable broadband no matter where we live. It is a game changer for regional communities let down by nine years of the conservative government, because having access to fast and reliable internet has never been more important in this increasingly interconnected world.

I am proud to belong to an Albanese government that is providing the NBN and ensuring communities like ours are not left behind. The unmetered service is being enabled by this government's $480 million investment to upgrade NBN fixed-wireless services that are moving around 120,000 premises from satellite to fixed wireless, freeing up capacity on Sky Muster. This complements the commitment we made at the election to improve broadband technologies in regional areas. We also invested a whopping $2.4 billion to expand full-fibre NBN to an additional 1.5 million premises; 660,000 of those will be in regional areas. We are delivering on our election commitment, something the other lot never did.

Under the former coalition government, residents in McEwen on Sky Muster were capped, the data was limited, and it was limited to when you could actually have access to it. There was even a restriction that those forced to be on Sky Muster were limited to only downloading 55 gigabytes per month, and that was downloading between 7 am and 1 am. Even in the face of the pandemic, when more people were working from home and staying home to keep our community safe, no changes were made to support them. High-speed broadband communication services are not just expected to be provided by a competent government but are essential for people to engage in work and in education in this day and age.

It's another example of where the Liberals and Nationals failed the communities of McEwen. We have been paying for a service that we have not been getting for years now, but finally under the Albanese Labor government we are delivering for residents in McEwen. We are no longer getting the coalition's second-rate service where we were paying more and receiving less than inner-city counterparts. We finally have communications infrastructure that residents of McEwen not only need but rightfully deserve, particularly as we have been 100 per cent into the former government's line about having regional areas with major road transport in disaster areas, but where they failed to deliver anything more than 1½ towers in nine years of coalition madness.