Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Once again, Senator Paterson is just putting government spin on something that is completely untrue. The minister's answer has revealed just another chapter in the saga of the delays, the cost blowouts and the broken promises in the rollout of Malcolm Turnbull's second-rate copper NBN.

When Mr Turnbull changed the method of delivery for fixed line premises, he called it the 'multitechnology mix'. My constituents in Tasmania are calling it 'Malcolm Turnbull's mess'. They're blatantly calling it that. They have no regard for what the government has done to what the Labor Party initially started as a great process. We all remember, before the 2013 election, when 'Mr Broadband' himself stood before the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, hoping to be the leader once again—we know that—and promised that the NBN would be delivered by the end of 2016. Well, can I tell you he missed that target by 7 million homes.

Mr Turnbull also promised that the NBN would cost $29.5 billion. That cost has now blown out to $49 billion. And, because private investors don't want to go anywhere near Mr Turnbull's second-rate copper network, the government has had to bail out the project with a $19.5 billion loan. In 2013, Mr Turnbull promised NBN users of his second-rate copper network that they could upgrade to full fibre for $2,250. Well, the average cost to date is $15,800, and some individuals have been quoted as much as $149,000. It's no wonder that NBN customers on the second-rate copper network want to upgrade to full fibre, because the copper network is a mess. A recent Choice survey found that NBN users are experiencing slow speeds and dropouts 76 per cent of the time.

The NBN Co's chief, Bill Morrow, might like to blame customers or the retail service provider—in fact, anyone but his own company—but Australians aren't buying it. They know that under the instructions of Mr Turnbull, Senator Cormann and Senator Fifield, that NBN Co are rolling out an outdated network using last century's technology. And we know on this side that the overwhelming majority of complaints about service dropouts and slow speeds relate to the second-rate, copper based NBN. Figures from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman show that an NBN user is five times more likely to complain than users of other telecommunications services. And seven out of 10 of the postcodes that the TIO receives complaints from are served by fibre to the node.

I know personally about these complaints, as do my Tasmanian colleagues in the House—Julie Collins, the member for Franklin, and Brian Mitchell, the member for Lyons—because, along with Michelle Rowlands, our shadow communications minister, we held a public meeting. We had over 100 southern Tasmanian residents in a room that was packed. We held this meeting a few weeks ago. We heard those residents talk about the delays, the dropouts, the multivisits by technicians and being sent two or three modems. Almost all of these related to Mr Turnbull's outdated copper network.

And, just while we're talking about Tasmania, I still have to remind people—I've talked about it a few times—that there's a little area about 17 minutes south of Hobart called Howden, with 600-odd households. They were completely left off the map continually until I started asking questions in estimates about why they kept being left off the map. They couldn't get anything. They are 17 minutes from a capital city and they couldn't get access to anything. As I've said before in this place, a full fibre rollout for fixed-line connections is inevitable, because it's the technology that Australians not only need but they're actually demanding for today.

Fibre to the premises is the technology we need if we are to compete in the global digital economy. It's the technology, let me remind people, that is being rolled out by competing nations overseas, including in the UK, where British Telecom is considering building a full fibre network. That's right. That is the same British Telecom that Mr Turnbull pointed to as an example of the success of his flawed copper based approach. They're now considering plans to deliver— (Time expired)