Coasters punished by NBN blowout but MPs are silent

BEFORE a Joint Standing Committee, the NBN chief financial officer (Stephen Rue) conceded the HFC rollout delay could have a negative $500 million impact on the project.

“If the program was delayed by six months, what you have is, we have I think 1.9 million customers still to connect, that we expect to connect,” he said.

“So if all of those 1.9 million customers, and I don’t think that’s necessarily going to be the case, but if they were all delayed by six months, you’d be talking about a $500 million delay in revenue.”

This outcome would require a further $500 million to be drawn down from a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded contingency pool, which is repeatedly being used to patch-up Turnbull’s multitechnology mess.

This will sting the Gold Coast in particular. Of the 82 suburbs in the Gold Coast region, 26 are waiting to be connected to the NBN through the HFC network. So not only can a third of all Gold Coast suburbs expect massive delays to their connection to the NBN, but as taxpayers, their residents will wear the brunt of it too.

This is yet another bitter pill for taxpayers and consumers who are being punished with a second-rate network that costs more and does less.

Under Turnbull’s second-rate NBN, Gold Coasters are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

It’s no wonder that under the LNP, Australia’s internet speed ranking fell from 30th in 2013 to a dismal 51st place in the world.

And Gold Coasters are the ones who are suffering. Despite holding every single federal seat on the Gold Coast, the LNP MPs have refused to stand up to Malcolm Turnbull on this issue.

Every day that the Gold Coast LNP MPs are silent is another day that small businesses and our community suffers.

It’s about time our Gold Coast MPs stopped taking the Gold Coast for granted and started fighting for high-speed internet. MURRAY WATT LABOR SENATOR FOR QUEENSLAND