Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Businesses can struggle with what should be the simplest of transactions. A mobile service would address all of these issues. Last Friday, about 20 locals gathered to meet with Telstra to pursue the options. Technical complications abound, backhaul capacity from the nearest access point to the Telstra network is limited to the radio-microwave link from Leigh Creek to Hawker, which is at full capacity—no room for a mobile service! A replacement optic fibre, which surely must happen at some stage, will cost in the vicinity of $3 million. Should this eventuate—to hook Blinman, 30 kilometres to the east, through the ranges to Parachilna—it will require a new radio link. The erection of the station and the link would cost a further $750,000 and the facility would service just the immediate district around Blinman but not the rest of the Flinders. Telstra have said that they would require external funding to that level before they would install. Clearly, this amount of money will not be raised by the local community. It will require support from elsewhere.

The community is not deterred. Nothing ever gets fixed by doing nothing, so they are forming a lobby group with representation drawn from all groups of influence in the area to push for a solution for the region. Unfortunately, the Labor government have no plan for telecommunications in regional Australia, apart from the fall-back position in their economically flawed National Broadband Network proposals, where communities like Blinman, with fewer than 1,000 people, receive the default satellite option—the same inadequate service they have now.

If rural and regional Australia is to pay 10 per cent of the cost of the $43 billion broadband experiment, it is fair to think that there should be investment in addressing their issues. The government’s National Broadband Network plan is status quo only and simply not good enough. Having robbed the telecommunications fund set aside to meet just this type of circumstance, the government deny regional Australia any chance of a fair deal. Good governments govern for all Australians, not just those who support them. I will assist this group in any way that I can to help address the regional imbalance.

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