SUSAN TEMPLEMAN, MEMBER FOR MACQUARIE: I’m Susan Templeman Member for Macquarie, I’m also Deputy Chair of the Parliamentary NBN Committee. I want to talk about the revelation that there’s been a secret document that the government has known about since 2013 that shows that the additional cost of the NBN network could have been, sorry I’ll give you that number again. The secret document shows that the cost of NBN was $15 billion less than what the government was saying. Now the headline figure is $10 billion, but they had to borrow $10 billion and the report says that when you look at the cumulative debt, that’s another five to six billion. So $15 billion to build a network that is providing an unequal service, and I want to talk about how unequal it is in my electorate, in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury.
Within one couple of kilometre radius, you have people some of whom are on fibre to the premises, the only sort of NBN that’s providing a really reliable service. They have fibre to the premises. Others have fibre to the curb. Others have fibre to the node, some people are on satellite and others are offered wireless, and that’s within a small area around Wilberforce, and around Pitt Town in the Hawkesbury. So this is a system that has let down people. The difference between having fibre to the premises and being allowed to connect to a satellite is the difference between being able to effectively run a business from home. In the Blue Mountains we have fibre to the node where one of my constituents, an international presenter, is unable to even go for certain work because he knows he’s going to have drop-outs and he can’t guarantee to do live broadcasting with fibre to the node. In the Lower Mountains we’ve got fibre to the curb where the boxes just get zapped and blow up whenever there’s a storm, hundreds of boxes. So you’ve got the most inefficient system, and it’s cost a lot more than the government expected, and what we now know is that all along they knew that rolling out fibre to the premises as Labor had planned was going to cost $10 billion headline, $15 billion all up, less than they were telling people. This was a deliberate deception by Tony Abbott, by Malcolmn Turnbull and the assistant minister at the time, Paul Fletcher. They did not disclose these figures, and that’s left people in my electorate and across the country with a legacy of sub-standard NBN. A lot people just say forget the NBN, I’m sticking to 4G if they have access to that. I’ve got people who say forget satellite, I’m going to stick with ADSL. Now that’s an appalling state for Australia to be in after so much investment to have such a poor outcome.
JOURNALIST: Susan can I ask you, your area, your electorate of Macquarie, a lot of attention has been paid to that recently, we’ve seen suggestions in Newspoll today that Anthony Albanese’s not in a very strong position. That doesn’t bode well for your electorate either does it?
TEMPLEMAN: Look, the polls will come and they’ll go, we’re within striking distance and what I’m focused on is helping to get the people of Macquarie, the people in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury, a better deal from this government who’ve dudded them on the NBN, they’ve been dudded by a sub-standard system. We’ve been duded over bushfire recovery money, and this is the time for us to be holding the government to account. We have had a tough, Australia has had a tough year to get through, but from my perspective nothing more can happen under the cover of COVID. It’s time to call the government to account, and that’s what Anthony Albanese and the entire Labor team will be doing.
JOURNALIST: Do you think there’s a cultural problem in this place?
TEMPLEMAN: I think if you’ve got the sorts of rape claims and experiences that we’ve been hearing about in the last week, you’ve got a dastardly culture. This is the most distressing thing that you can hear in a workplace, and I think that really shook this parliament to the core last week. I hope that out of this the Prime Minister is serious in his acceptance of the offer by Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek to work on a whole of parliament approach to this. Every single person in this place – women, young women, older women, young men, older men – should all be feeling safe and supported if something criminal happens in this place, and I think there’s still a lot for the government to do to indicate that that’s what’s going to happen.
JOURNALIST: You mentioned you think there is a cultural problem what we heard last week. Is the cultural problem on both sides?
TEMPLEMAN: I think you have to assume that there are people who will do the wrong thing throughout a society. What we need to have is the best systems in place, and Labor’s been very serious about improving the processes that we have. I want to know that my staff, should something happen, have very clear ways of seeking help and that as an MP, if something happens to one of my staff, I also have a really clear pathway to know how best to support them.
JOURNALIST: Isn’t the issue though around making sure that women feel 100 per cent comfortable enough in going to the police to report something like this, that they won’t lose their job? Isn’t that what this comes down to is the women involved not feeling like they would be supported enough to go through the whole process and that their job could be on the line?
TEMPLEMAN: No one should ever have to make a choice between reporting a criminal offence and keeping their job. It should be an absolute given and the person who’s experienced, whether it’s harassment through to rape, should know that they are supported 100 per cent by their employer to have justice done. It shouldn’t matter how long it takes for the person who’s been the victim to come forward and talk about what’s happened. We’re human beings, we do things in our own time, and we need to have that time, but people need to be supported at every step of the way, so as soon as they are feeling in a place to report it, they know that their job is secure. And they shouldn’t have had to have given up their career ambitions for that to happen. I don’t ever want to see, none of us, I don’t think any of us want to see a repeat of what we saw last week, and that requires real action by the government, and we are there to help support that action every step of the way.
JOURNALIST: Do you think the Prime Minister misled the parliament and the Australian public last week when he said that his office wasn’t aware [inaudible]
TEMPLEMAN: I think you’d have to ask the Prime Minister that. I don’t know what he
