Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kennedy for his question. I understand his concern about this matter, because I am very concerned about it too. In the first discussion I had with Premier Newman about the circumstances in Queensland, this was a matter that we discussed. There was the loss of telecommunications, and there was a considerable geographic area of Queensland where people were therefore unable to make triple-0 calls, and of course that is a very concerning thing. Telstra worked to restore communications capability, and as that work was underway I kept my eye on that because I understood how important it was that this telecommunications capacity got back up and running as soon as possible. So we saw this outage as a result of flood damage in Queensland, and I can understand the member for Kennedy's concerns that we do not want to see that kind of loss of telecommunications again.

I think we have to be fairly practical about what we can do and what we cannot do. The reality is that there will always be some circumstances of nature that are so ferocious that, even with the best of preparations, things that people identify as necessary services, services that we are all used to living with, will be lost. Indeed, the Leader of the Nationals referred to the loss of things like power and gas. Those things do happen in circumstances of natural disaster. But we should be doing everything we can to make the networks that bring these services to people as resilient as possible.

I have certainly asked for further information on this issue in Queensland, how it happened and what we can learn from it.

I talked about it publicly in Queensland. I was asked about it on radio and said, 'Of course, it is incumbent upon us to learn everything we can from this natural disaster to have better resilience next time.' We have learnt from natural disasters in the past. For example, we learnt from the bushfires in Victoria. That is what led to us having the capability, during these natural disasters, to put warnings on people's phones. They were very valuable for people.

I can assure the member for Kennedy that, in the design of the NBN, NBN Co. are placing the highest priority on reliability and strength of the network in the design and planning stages. They have taken into account natural disaster occurrences, like flooding, in the basic network design. But if there is something we can learn for the future from what happened in Queensland this summer then I am certainly very determined to learn it and make sure that we respond to that lesson.

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