Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Ageing and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to oppose the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Communications Fund) Bill 2008 as I believe it is a raid on rural Australia and its telecommunications future, but I cannot leave the comments from the previous speaker, the member for New England, unanswered. I was not in this House last year; I am a new member. But last year I was the mayor of a shire that was partly inside the member for New England’s area. Part of my role as a mayor was to encourage businesspeople and skilled tradespeople to come to fill particular skills shortages in my electorate and to move and build up our population. We went to a function in Sydney called Country Week, to which medical professionals, builders, plumbers and small business people came. They asked me where I was from. I said that I came from the Gwydir shire, which is in the New England region of New South Wales. Someone said, ‘We can’t go there; the phones don’t work. I run a business and I need to have a mobile phone. If our family is going to be away, we need broadband.’ But the member for New England did not say in his speech that all the towns in his electorate have broadband and mobile phone coverage and that most of the rural areas in between do as well. We hear a lot of half-truths in this debate about the rollout of telecommunications in regional Australia. Later on I will get on to how we have some holes to fill and how we will have problems in the future.

I think that the negative argument that has been led by the member for New England has done irreparable damage to the growth of that electorate. I am wondering, as the representative of that area for over 20 years, what sort of a contribution he has made to the growth of that area. He spoke of 95 per cent of the people in his electorate opposing the sale of Telstra. What he did not say was that it was 95 per cent of the five per cent of the people that responded to his survey. He spoke about Next G not being up to scratch. I can remember hearing him on ABC radio late last year, having spent all day with a Telstra crew in a car, commenting that the Next G coverage that he was experiencing as he drove from Tamworth through the electorate, ending up at Wallangra and Yetman, was actually better than CDMA. While I acknowledge that we do have problems, I think the idea of taking a debate and focusing on the negatives is doing enormous damage to rural Australia, and I take particular offence that it is affecting my area as well.

The interest from the Communications Fund, as the member for New England stated, was to fund upgrades of regional telecommunications. People living outside metropolitan areas need reliable access to telecommunications services. The days of having mobile coverage are no longer a luxury; they are part of doing business in Australia. If you listen to the arguments of the member for New England, you would think that phones did not work. He mentioned the town of Yetman. Yetman is in need of a phone tower because there are areas where phones do not work. I pass through Yetman on a regular basis. I used to cart cattle through there on a weekly basis and I have memories of making phone calls in that same area on my mobile phone.

In the 12 years of the previous government we saw an enormous rollout of mobile phone coverage and towers right across regional Australia, but there are still some holes. In areas of my electorate we still have some holes in mobile phone coverage. The Mudgee-Goolma area has poor mobile phone coverage, as do the towns of Pilliga and Collie and a few other places like those. This fund was vitally important to keep that upgrade going. The Next G network is having major problems, but the issue is with the handsets. I have spent considerable time testing the network. I am convinced that the network is up to scratch, but Telstra has sold many handsets that are not up to scratch. I think that it needs to address that problem.

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