Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Protecting Services for Rural and Regional Australia into the Future) Bill 2007 before us today is the key to ongoing locked-in protection for rural, regional and remote telecommunications services for all Australians. Note that I say ‘all Australians’, not the 75 per cent of Australians who might be covered by Labor’s program.

The bill amends the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999 to establish permanent protection for the $2 billion principal of the Communications Fund. It stems from the government’s response to the recommendations of the regional telecommunications independent review committee regarding the adequacy of telecommunications services in regional, rural and remote areas.

In effect, this bill locks away the Communications Fund’s principal of about $2 billion so that only the interest earned from that amount—up to $400 million over three years or so—can be drawn upon to fund telecommunications infrastructure upgrades in regional areas. Earlier this year, the opposition criticised the creation of a perpetual Communications Fund for regional Australia and alluded to it being created just to assuage the rural voters about future services for the bush. Dead right it was! It was meant to assuage the rural voters and their concerns over the years.

We do not seem to realise that the whole field of telecommunications is changing dramatically. When I came into this place—I can remember campaigning back in 1993—the telephone that used to hang off my waist and half pull my trousers down was about the size of a bottle of tomato sauce. Today mobile phones are tiny little things that you can put in your pocket and they can almost be unseen. The same thing applies to computers. We thought some of those early kilobit speeds were just marvellous. I do not dispute what the member for Capricornia said about greater speeds being required in the future, but she spoke as if that had always been known. It was not known to be so. Even after we have made these decisions this year—and even assuming that the opposition become the government and they implement what they propose—in another three or four years that will all change again. It is a moving feast.

We in the National Party understand that millions of people who live outside the major capital cities make a huge contribution to the wealth of this nation and that without communications technology that is comparable to the cities these communities will be choked off from any further development. That is not just a wide claim from a National Party country member; that is really what happens. To me it always beggars belief why anyone would want to have the top telecommunications ports and abilities in the capital cities and then deny the same level of service to those at the far extremities of the services in regional and rural Australia. Trade is a two-way thing. I have met some graziers in recent times, including one grazier who turns off 170,000 head a year and another who turns off 240,000 head. They are constantly on the internet. They have to arrange for live cattle exports. They have to track slaughtered meat: they have to track cattle to feedlots and from there to abattoirs and to marketing organisations. They have to buy chemicals. They have large payroll obligations on their properties. Of course they need high speeds. They need high speeds just as much as any business in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or Brisbane.

That is why I find Labor’s plan somewhat deficient. Theirs is going to take longer to implement. As I said, in four or five years time the whole thing will have changed again, so that by the time the Labor scheme is in place the agenda will have moved on. Not only that; the Labor plan covers 75 per cent. In our scheme, we are now drilling down to the last one or two per cent of Australians; we are looking at the 98-plus per cent area. That is why I found the member for Capricornia’s dismissive disregard for the OPEL proposal so disappointing. For a start, it requires only $950 million of government input, and it leverages up a comparable amount. So, all in all, it is a $1.9 billion service. In her speech the member for Capricornia quoted some people from Rockhampton. I come from that same Central Queensland environment. I know the sorts of problems people are having, but we all know by now that ADSL will only go out 4¼ kilometres. We all know that, so we look for other alternatives.

I have not seen the maps, I must admit, for the electorate of Capricornia, but I have certainly seen the ones for Hinkler—as I said, we are in the same general environment—and just about the whole of the new Hinkler electorate will be covered. There is a small corner in a place called Didcot that will not be covered, but the whole of the rest of the electorate will be covered, including three large areas at Bargara, Dundowran and Hervey Bay that will have ADSL2+. If I were the member for Capricornia I would be wondering how people in my electorate might engage with WiMAX. I do not know where she got this dismissive idea that it is obsolete technology. I know that there is a debate going on about the unallocated spectrum aspects of WiMAX, but not about the basic technology. In fact, I took the time, the week before last, to meet an international expert on this who came Australia. I met this person in Sydney and spent some time with them to understand where the rest of the world is going with WiMAX. It is clearly not going where the member for Capricornia thinks it is going.

The opposition have been trying to woo the people of rural and regional Australia, but their take on the matter of protecting telecommunications for these people is emblematic of a very myopic commitment to non-metropolitan Australians. If the opposition had a genuine understanding of the needs of regional Australia, they would back this Communications Fund to the hilt. They would say in office, ‘We will build on it.’ But, no, what did they say? Did they say, ‘We will go out and build some more mobile towers and do things like that’? No, they will throw $4.7 billion at it. Where will they get it from? Will they be leveraging up what the private sector should be doing or will it just be Christmas Day for one lucky telecommunications company that ends up with $4.7 billion? Where will it come from? It will come from a fund that was designed to provide protection for country people into the future.

There has always been, as I have understood it, a certain protocol in politics, whereby if you set up a fund to do things like this the other side respect it. They may not agree with it or with every aspect of it. But, where it is of a perpetual nature, you tend to respect it. You do not say, ‘Forget those guys in the bush; we’re going to have that fund.’ Everyone knows where the immediate beneficiaries will be. They will be in the capital cities and the larger provincials: Gold Coast, Geelong, Wollongong, Townsville. I am not against those people having top-grade telecommunications, but I want to see it happen across Australia in an orderly fashion. The other $2.7 billion that will make up this $4.7 billion that the Labor Party is proposing to spend would come from the Future Fund. We all know what that is meant to guarantee in the future.

Successive Commonwealth governments, in good times, have never made provision for their liabilities into the future, especially in matters like superannuation. The one thing that the Queensland government, of all political colours, has done over the years is look to the future and cover its liabilities. It has done that with, for example, workers compensation and superannuation. That will be a great boon to the state as it moves forward. The current Treasurer, realising that we were going through a time of prosperity, said, ‘This is the golden opportunity for Australia, for the Commonwealth government, to do the same thing—to make provision for our liabilities—so that, as the Australian population ages and there are fewer taxpayers, we will have funds put aside to cover that superannuation.’ Labor will raid it. Some have said, ‘If you raid it for one thing, the next time you get into a tight corner, what do you do? You raid it again and again and again,’ and then you come back to where you were in the first instance.

We can see the mess the states have already got themselves into in a very short time. Within the next five years they will be carrying $70 billion worth of debt. There are people out there today, when we have seen interest rates go up a quarter of one per cent, saying, ‘There are no inflationary factors.’ Well, that is an inflationary factor, and that has been brought upon us. It will be even more so if things like the Future Fund are raided. As I said, this $4.7 billion is not guaranteed to cover the whole of Australia. It is going to be a slower roll-out. Optimistically, it will cover about 75 per cent of people.

We recently announced the Australia Connected program, which is designed from the grassroots to meet the specific needs of regional and rural people. The government will spend $958 million, and that will be complemented by $970 million from the OPEL conglomerate, which, as we all know, is Optus and Elders. People have made the crass statement, ‘We are giving a billion dollars to Singapore.’ We do not say that to companies that are operating in Australia in other fields. Why would we make such a crass statement? People come here to invest in our country and build profit centred units of various sorts, with various companies in manufacturing or delivering various products and services. On an open tender basis, they agree to do a certain job for this country; when they win the tender, you do not turn around and say, ‘You are giving a billion dollars to Singapore.’ That is crass. That is unworthy of the Labor Party. We all know on both sides of the House how these things work. That is not the way the government acts and that is not the way I believe the opposition would act either.

I heard the member for Capricornia talking about people in Central Queensland and people in North Rockhampton and just west of Rockhampton. As I said earlier, we are going to try to get to 99-plus per cent of the people of Australia at speeds of 12 megabits, and we will do it by 2009. That is a far more optimistic view than that of Labor. What they will do is slower, its coverage is not as wide, and to get there they raid two important funds—the Communications Fund and the Future Fund.

I am delighted that we have got ADSL2+ broadband going into Bargara and Dundowran, and Torquay, in Hervey Bay. In my old electorate there will be two sites at Gladstone, with 25 other wireless tower sites around the Hinkler electorate. That is going to provide amazing coverage and it will give people who have never had it before access to 12 megabits. I would have thought that that was a good basis for starting a roll-out rather than just dismissively saying, ‘It is old technology and we are paying a billion dollars to the Singaporeans.’ The Australia Connected package will not raid the Communications Fund, it will not neglect the three million households and small business who make up the 25 per cent who are not covered and it will not take four years to establish. As I said before, at the end of the four years, we will probably see a change in technology anyhow. I was interested to hear what the President of the National Farmers Federation, David Crombie, had to say. David, like me, is originally a Warwick boy. We grew up in a country area. We know what the needs of country areas are. I quote his statement on this:

... the funding injection of some $1.8 billion will help ensure rural and regional Australians can keep pace with new technologies as they come online ... The choice of Wimax wireless technology, supplementing the additional ADSL2+ technology, to deliver services ‘from the exchange to the farm’ is vitally important, but also provides the opportunity for scalable high speed broadband into the future.

That is an optimistic view not of someone who is sitting on the sidelines as a critic or a theorist but of someone who comes from a farming and grazing background and who would know on a day-to-day basis what the needs of his members might be.

In the few minutes remaining I would like to say a bit about mobile telephony. I accept that that too will have a lot of changes in the future. I accept that there will be bigger, better and more empowered forms of handsets coming on stream, and I accept that 3G, or Next G, technology—whatever you like to call it—will deliver that. But, equally, we need to be sure that, as we roll out a new technology like that, it gets the coverage of all regional and rural Australia. I am not yet convinced. I have constituents, particularly in the Wallaville and Childers areas of my electorate, who tell me that they are not getting the same coverage from Next G as they have been getting from CDMA. We all have the memory—those of us in the country, anyhow—of the Labor Party turning off analog before GSM had been properly tested. Despite the protestations at the time, GSM, although a good technology, did not have the coverage for regional and rural people. That caused, in a period of about 18 to 21 months, the roll-out of CDMA, and CDMA has been good technology for regional Australia.

I am not a stick-in-the-mud—I know that new technologies have to roll on—but I want to be absolutely sure that we take regional and rural people with us as we do that. I am a sceptic. I do not want to see the CDMA turned off until that coverage is there. The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts has said that an audit will be carried out by ACMA to make sure that we have at least equivalent, if not better, coverage from Next G. I for one back her to the hilt on that. I know that Telstra have had some other problems in the roll-out of Next G—and I am not critical of that—in that some of the handsets were not suitable to Australian conditions, and I compliment them on going ahead and designing a new handset with a navy blue tick on it. I think that is a good idea. But I would also say to them: if, as you are tuning up this new technology, people who have surrendered their CDMAs find that they cannot get the same coverage as they might have with Next G, those handsets should be returned until such time as Next G has been fully proven. I think that is an essential part of this mobile agenda. I compliment the government on this bill. (Time expired)

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