A damning report into the telecommunications industry should serve as a wake-up call for the Liberal Government, Labor’s Ross Hart declared.
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The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman’s annual report found Launceston residents made the most number of complaints, 185, of the 2964 across Tasmania.
Bass MHR Ross Hart used the report to come out swinging against the federal government’s National Broadband Network – describing the 27,195 complaints lodged about services delivered over the NBN as a “damning indictment” on the government.
“Complaints about slow data speeds and homes left without useable internet or landline connections have skyrocketed,” he said.
“The true level of service failure is likely to be far greater than what is contained within the TIO report as most complaints are made to service providers, before reaching the TIO.
“It’s just not good enough that in a country like Australia you have businesses that rely on telecommunications services to sustain their operation suffering from failures.”
Mr Hart said the report should serve as a “wake-up call to the Liberals”.
“It’s time to fix their NBN debacle,” he said.
Tasmanian Liberal Senator David Bushby hit back, slamming Mr Hart for “misleading” the public.
“Labor has never been good with numbers,” he said.
“Mr Hart uses statistics in his release that are not relevant to specific connections or NBN faults.
“The very nature of the report, which covers issues relating to all forms of communication including phones, does not allow for such specifics to be extracted.”
Mr Bushby said there was no way to see how many of Launceston’s 185 complaints were related to the NBN.
“Further, for Tasmanians, the two most pressing concerns highlighted by the TIO report were customer service and billing and payments – both retailer issues not directly relevant to the NBN Company or to its rollout of the NBN network – even if those complaints related to the internet.
“Mr Hart would be well advised to do his research before making cheap political statements about the NBN – a project his party mishandled over two terms, connecting only 50,000 premises nationwide during that time.”