Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It might interest the member for Kingston that I recognise quite a few of those names, having grown up in Happy Valley and having played football for the Happy Valley Football Club. In fact, I was the president of the Happy Valley Football Club. I played cricket and tennis for Happy Valley.

A number of residents in Angaston, which is located in the Barossa region of my electorate, have contacted me with concerns about the lack of television reception they are receiving. The residents are concerned about the upgrade to high-definition signals given that they cannot get good enough reception for digital broadcasting at present. Residents are spending quite a lot of money on new digital technology televisions only to find the result is well below the desired level when they set it up. I am extremely concerned that around 1,400 residents in Lyndoch and Angaston remain without digital television reception and may not receive digital television until 2013 when the analog system becomes obsolete, and there is no guarantee of course that that black spot will be fixed up under the present government.

The Howard government ensured that there were no analog black spots in rural and regional areas under the Television Black Spots Program, which established retransmission facilities in Angaston and Lyndoch. It is now the responsibility of the Rudd government to upgrade the retransmission towers to assist the transition to digital television. The communications minister has failed to outline any alternative digital television plan and he is buying time in a bid to mask Labor’s lack of policy and planning for Australia’s digital future. I first raised this issue with the minister 18 months ago, so it seems as if there is a lack of will by Minister Conroy to fix this problem. I was especially disappointed when a member of my staff attempted to contact the minister’s office for advice about digital reception problems in Angaston but was advised that Minister Conroy would not assist us.

For a strong digital television service a line of sight to Mt Lofty is required. In Angaston the analog television service has been available through a repeater. I believe a similar system could be used to transmit the digital signal also. The analog system will eventually be switched off and residents in my electorate will be left with neither analog nor digital television reception.

The lack of response from the minister was just another example of a city-centric federal government, and unfortunately it seems to be a trend that this Labor government does not care about regional Australia. I compare this with the situation with analog telephones when we first came into government in 1996. Many of the rural areas in my electorate were left without any sort of mobile phone service. It was the Howard government that was left to fix that problem by introducing CDMA telephone services. I hope the same does not occur in the future.

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