Fairer NBN for Lalor

The NBN rollout is chaotic and is creating a digital divide for people living in Lalor.

Under the Abbott Government’s plans, local residents will miss out on superfast fibre broadband and instead will be forced to rely on last century’s copper phone lines.

The truth is that the NBN is being rolled out slower now than it was before the election

Before the election Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull promised that all Australians would get the NBN “sooner” – by 2016.

After the election they broke that promise and now they won’t tell us when we will get the NBN or what sort of NBN areas of Point Cook, Tarneit, Truganina and Wyndham Vale will get.

There have been no new areas in Lalor added to the NBN rollout maps since the election in 2013.

The Abbott Government is deliberately keeping the Wyndham community in the dark on the NBN. That means local families and businesses could have to wait up to five years to find out when they will get Turnbull’s second-rate NBN.

This isn’t good enough.

Across the City of Wyndham we have some lucky households already connected to the NBN. Other areas are set to be connected in the coming months, ironically where they can mostly already access cable.

We have other areas where developers have provided the pit infrastructure but these pits remain empty while estates wait for the NBN rollout.

We have areas where ADSL is available but not to all households, due to a lack of ports. We also have areas where expensive wireless is the only infrastructure is available.

Coming to grips with the technology mix being implemented takes a herculean effort going from map to map and provider to provider.

The planned provision is certainly disappointing for those expecting anything close to Labor’s NBN and will do nothing to even out the digital divide that already exists for our residents and businesses.

Local Lalor families and business deserve better.