Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about one of the Central Coast's most resilient, most beautiful yet perhaps most underserviced communities. I am of course speaking about the Mangrove Mountain community and the surrounding mountain districts, who have been neglected—dare I say abandoned—by their local member, Lucy Wicks, who is missing in action. The residents of Mangrove Mountain have been failed by a succession of federal Liberal governments. They've certainly been failed in the area of the NBN rollout and further have been failed by telecommunications providers that have left the entire community without regular or reliable connectivity for their computers or mobile phones. Residents have told me that, despite being a mere 76 kilometres away from Sydney's CBD, the telecommunications infrastructure in Mangrove Mountain has gone backwards in the past 20 years. One resident even wrote to me that his ancestors' homing pigeons would be faster and more reliable than their current internet connections.

This lack of infrastructure affects the education, health care and social lives of Mountain residents. It affects payment times, EFTPOS terminals and online sales ability for these small businesses. It breaks my heart when I hear great local business leaders who are trying to grow, who are employing people, who have jobs on their books that cannot be filled because they cannot function properly as businesses because of this government's failure to provide them with basic infrastructure that is fit for the 21st century. The community has also indicated to me that the current state of affairs on the watch of this Liberal-Nationals government affects the community's ability to live lives of dignity and lives of connectedness. In an increasingly isolated world with lockdowns, AI customer support and a growing preference for Zoom over face-to-face interactions, the lack of appropriate digital and telecommunications infrastructure can only make our society more divided, more lonely and more stratified. These people cannot get in contact with their service provider. They spend hours and hours on the telephone line waiting for a response, and when they get there it drops out, or they're subject to having to answer standard questions, and failure to respond is common.

This is a community that's been taken for granted by the local member, Lucy Wicks. Despite winning over 72 per cent, two-party preferred, at the Mangrove Mountain booth in 2019, she's refused all calls to visit the area since the election. She is even refusing to reply to emails or letters from desperate residents asking for her help to secure adequate, functioning communications infrastructure. The Liberals and Nationals do this. They just take regional communities for granted. They show up at the communities every three years, they take the votes and then they disappear until the next election rolls around. Well, not anymore—not at Mangrove Mountain anymore. This community is sick to death of being taken for granted.

Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party gutted the NBN, which would have been a great leveller of the tyranny of distance that so plagues our rural and regional communities. Instead, this government, under a different leadership but with the same temperament, rolled out a terrible copper nightmare in Australia, which has gradually slipped down the internet speed world rankings to 68th position out of 177 countries, when we were formerly up at 20th. That's a massive decline in capacity for this country. We cannot build the knowledge based economy of the future or truly unleash our regional economies until we provide them with the digital justice that they deserve.

I was welcomed into the historic Mangrove Mountain community hall on 14 December, along with my rock star state colleague Liesl Tesch, to listen to over 60 mountain residents speak about neglect by this government and how the lack of digital infrastructure affects the way that they work, learn and relax every single day. I listened to them. I heard their passion for their community and their desire to make it a more livable and vibrant place. I promised them I would fight for digital justice, and I'm here tonight doing just that. We've already had some success in securing an NBN drop-in session this year for residents, and Labor will keep fighting to ensure that that community is not overlooked and that they are hosted with similar sessions. (Time expired)