Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, Senator Bilyk, 40,000 premises. Nowhere is there greater uncertainty than in my local community on the north-west coast of Tasmania. Under Labor, NBN work was scheduled to start in Devonport in December last year, with Ulverstone following in February this year and Burnie next month. Under the Liberals these three areas, which are among Tasmania's largest, have dropped off NBN maps entirely—they just disappeared—leaving locals in NBN limbo, unsure what type of broadband they will end up with and when it will finally be delivered. It is no secret that we have some challenges to face in the north-west, but Labor's NBN gave the community real hope that we could stake out our place in the digital economy. This vital digital infrastructure would drive investment that would, in turn, create the needed jobs—something that we desperately need in north-west Tasmania.

People were starting to fear that the people of the north-west would be unable to offer business or families the infrastructure that is becoming an increasingly important part of modern life. No-one in the government is willing to give timetables, and the promises before the election to honour all Tasmanian contracts vanished in a puff of hot air. Last week, however, it looked like the north-west and, indeed, the whole state might finally get a reprieve and the wheels of the Tasmanian NBN rollout might finally start turning again after more than a year of government inaction.

The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was due to visit Devonport for an NBN forum, and he did come. The hope was that he would lay out a plan to finally deliver on his election promise of rolling out full-fibre NBN to our state and to our local community. The local member, Brett Whiteley, went on the record saying that the government needed to do 'much more' on the NBN—so their own members are saying they need to do much more—and that added to the feeling that some good news might be around the corner and that it might be delivered on that day. If the community approached this forum with high hopes, it did not take long to dash them entirely as the minister outlined that the north-west would not get the full-fibre NBN that was promised prior to the last election. He could not even tell us when the rollout would actually start. So people who came along to that forum were not given any commitment about when it would occur—again, broken promises. He confirmed the north-west would be cast away to the digital dark lands, doomed to get a substandard offering delivered up to four years late, with no start date in sight.

Tasmania's north-west NBN was being trashed before our eyes, just like the words spoken by the Liberals before the election. This is an absolute betrayal of the people of the north-west coast and it is, quite simply, reprehensible. Just as the Liberals are determined to create a nation of haves and have-nots with their cruel budget measures, so they plan to split our state into a division of digital haves and have-nots. On one side are the haves that will receive Labor's high-quality, world-class, full-fibre broadband. Those people will see their property prices grow, their leisure options increase and their ability to participate in the digital economy expand. On the other side will be many thousands of Tasmanians who are the digital have-nots. Those people, including those in my community, are being offered a cobbled together solution of fibre and ageing, disintegrating copper wires. They will see lower property prices and investors more likely to bypass their area in favour of the digitally superior alternatives. And then, when the decades-old copper wires finally give up, the whole thing will have to be done all over again.

Promising people high-speed, full-fibre internet before the election and delivering a substandard solution afterwards shows pure contempt for the Tasmanian people, not to mention the very serious erosion of trust in our democratic processes. Let's do this once and let's do it properly. Let's not shackle future government with the cost of cleaning up a substandard copper-hybrid mess. And let's invest to secure Tasmania's place in the digital economy of the future. Tasmanians do not deserve to be treated so shabbily; they do deserve the full-fibre NBN that they were promised by the Liberal Party prior to the last election. We call on them to deliver that and deliver it now.