Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In speaking on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Communications Fund) Bill 2008 I take up where my colleague the member for New England left off. He referred to the $2 billion Communications Fund that Senator Barnaby Joyce claimed that he had secured. There is no doubt, referring to that fund, that he did play an instrumental part in securing that money. But our damnable problem in Australia is that so many people have believed that the National Party would look after their interests. They have not looked after our interests, however, and this is a classic case. In the vote on the sale of Telstra at the Central Council of the National Party in Longreach, all but about 12 or 15 of the people associated with two of the federal members who were there—they brought their friends, relatives and close associates—voted against the sale of Telstra, and voted with considerable aggression. The then vice-president, Rowell Walton, subsequently resigned from the party. He could not see the point in staying in a party which had resolved, almost unanimously, to go in a certain direction. Then two weeks later our senator from Queensland, Barnaby Joyce—and you yourself, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, in the chair this evening, had the decency at least to stay quiet about it—went out and told us what a good thing it was for us. He convinced nobody; he just further damaged the reputation of the party.

The member for New England referred to the $100 million per year interest on the $2 billion fund. I do not doubt this, but most of us would know there is capital improvement work being carried out by Telstra in our areas. There is not as much as we would like, but we know it is taking place. They were already spending $400 million per year to improve capital items and to improve services. At least half of those services were in regional areas. So there was already $400 million per year being spent in this area. The then government made a big thing out of guaranteeing $100 million. Mr Deputy Speaker, you would have to believe in the tooth fairy if you believed that Telstra were not going to simply take that $100 million per year and cut their expenditure from $400 million to $300 million. It was just a con. I do not blame Senator Joyce for being taken in by it. He was new to this place and he got conned. I think he learned a lot out of realising he should not believe what he is told by his superiors. He came off very badly from that—quite unfairly to him. But I and the rest of Queensland dearly wish that Barnaby had stood by his guns. He said he would oppose it. He did not oppose it and he broke a lot of hearts, as I said at the time in debate with him.

As late as last week, two of the very great gulf families banded together. James Pickering and his wife, Lea, are from two of the great families of the Gulf Country and they came together, married and have begun a family. Lea rang me up and said, ‘Bob, I have got enormous difficulties. We really cannot educate our kids on station properties now without a speedy broadband access and I cannot get it.’ She went into the details of why and how. A valuer rang me up and said, ‘Every single valuation I do in regional Australia, I have to dial into RP Data.’ RP Data, of course, is the firm in Australia that does all the evaluations. Both the Cattalans are very proudly Innisfail boys, so I do a little tiny bit of skiting there as I go past. Every valuation that is done in Australia—every single house transaction and every single property transaction in this country—requires access to RP Data, which is through the broadband network. If you do not have it, then you cannot have the valuations carried out. Obviously, if a valuer who is based, say, in Innisfail has to face up against a valuer who is based in Cairns and one has got speedy access and one has got slow access, then the one with the speedy access will be able to charge much, much less than the one with slow access. This illustrates graphically the enormous shortcomings that now exist where we do not have equal access to broadband. The third case that comes to mind is that of an engineer working on the Atherton Tablelands. He said that in his job he must have quick and speedy access to information on the internet. I do not think any of us would need an explanation as to why an engineering consultant would need speedy access to broadband. He said he is constantly losing business to the people in Cairns who have relatively speedy broadband access compared with his broadband access.

Each of these cases graphically illustrates the pain and the disadvantage suffered by us in country Australia as a result of an unequal broadband delivery service. So we applaud the government. There are those who said there was not much in the ALP proposals. Mind you, if I were in their situation and had IR running in my favour I would not have said too much either—I would have just enjoyed the ride—but they did make this commitment, and in fact it was a very good commitment, and we hope that they honour their promises. But, like Barnaby Joyce, I will reserve my opinion until I see the action on the ground, and I am sure my colleague from the south of my electorate will agree with me in this area.

There is a tiny township called Croydon right up almost at the Gulf of Carpentaria—you throw a stone and it lands in the sea almost, when you are at Croydon. I have been going to a cattle station there for many, many years. Only about 150 people live in Croydon. On my last official full-day visit there, I was very surprised to run into four separate people who had moved from cities—Cairns, Townsville, Sydney and Brisbane—and chosen to live in Croydon. I said, ‘Why would you suddenly decide to live in Croydon?’ They said: ‘Because we sold our house in Brisbane’—or wherever—‘and we got $300,000 for it. We were able to purchase a house up here for a very small proportion of that, so we could come up here and have $200,000 in the bank.’

If there are enough people doing this, then it will reverse the imbalance in Australia’s population distribution, which is costing us. The cost of providing the extra water in Brisbane is in the range of thousands of millions of dollars. The only water provision they can get is to drink their own sewage water, which is not a very happy alternative. We could get people moving out there instead. With the wonderful 24 television channels or whatever it is you can get off the satellite now, you can watch television in the city or in the bush. We have equal access. In the very important area of broadband, I have given three illustrations to demonstrate where kids are going to be at a disadvantage or where businesses are going to be at such a disadvantage that they may even have to close. I will give another example. Modern technology can help us greatly in the bush. Satellite television is an example. Broadband is another—if you can give us equal access.

In Brisbane, when I was in the state government, we were devising—in 1989, when the government fell—a spoke road system of very fast roads, and we had to upgrade the roads so that they would be safe at the speed of 120 kilometres an hour. We felt then that people could live 60 or 70 kilometres from Brisbane and still get to work in 20 minutes. There was a lot of work that needed to be done inside Brisbane itself. This spoke road concept depended upon our being able to provide for those people 60 kilometres from Brisbane exactly the same services that applied in Brisbane. That very much went to recreation, entertainment and television, and it would have gone to broadband. If we could do that, then the blockies—they call them blockies—could extend all the way from Brisbane, as they do now actually, up to Kingaroy, 250 kilometres. There is a lady shaking her head here. You do not think that is true?

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