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

This is an outrageous circumstance that we are faced with today. This is one of the most important bills in this parliament—I am sure I speak for all my colleagues on this side of the House—for all Australians, especially those from country areas. Is it not bad enough that we have had the communication funds cancelled? We had a $4.7 billion scheme which could, at least in part if not in totality, be delivered by the private sector and which is now going to be provided by the government in the very areas where it could look after itself. And worse than that, out in regional Australia we are told that this new fibre-to-the-node system will probably not get to us until 2012-13. That is simply not good enough.

Let me mention the circumstances in my own electorate, which are very similar to those in Wide Bay and Greenway. Nearly all our electorates were covered by the OPEL signal. One small corner of my electorate was not covered. In addition, we had three very extensive areas of ADSL2+. Now we are cancelling that and I find that in my electorate at places like Kalkie, Avoca, Branyan, Urangan and Bagara there are no ports available. Telstra has admitted these things: ‘There are not enough ADSL ports in these suburbs. There will not be any upgrades in the foreseeable future. Their best option is to take up wireless.’ Hey! Have Telstra missed something? Has Senator Conroy missed something? The very thing that the government’s scheme was supposed to obviate is now being offered by Telstra. Telstra is offering wireless, the very same wireless that the minister in the Senate and the minister at the table, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, are saying had to be cancelled.

In the short time available, I cannot canvass all these issues, but to me it seems suspiciously as though the government has, either wittingly or deliberately, re-monopolised Telstra. This is the re-monpolisation by Telstra of communications. So I suspect the very thing that the government cancelled will, if we want to get coverage before 2013, have to be delivered by wireless. That is exactly what the OPEL project offered. I am not saying that the OPEL project was faultless. It could have gone a lot further west. My friend the member for Maranoa was particularly concerned that, if you drew a line from about Charters Towers through Emerald, Dalby and Gunnedah to about Shepparton, anything west of that was problematic, and I certainly did not approve of that.

For the people of my electorate, this was a great solution—also for the people of Greenway and Wide Bay. Now we will have those same people waiting up to five years to get broadband. In the areas I am talking about—Hervey Bay, Maryborough, Noosa, Bundaberg, Western Sydney—we have universities and important industries which want high-speed ADSL. As part of our inquiry, we discovered that Telstra have quarantined some of these ports. I suspect the reason is so that they will not have to share them with their competitors. I say to the minister at the table that this ‘clear and transparent’ thing is anything but. I would also say that in the city of Hervey Bay—a rapidly expanding city—80 per cent of people will not be able to get high-speed ADSL because they will be reliant on pair gains and RIMs. This is a shambles. To reduce this important debate down to one speaker to the second reading and one during consideration in detail is outrageous.

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