Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to see you in the chair tonight, Mr Deputy Speaker Goodenough. I rise tonight to talk about an incident which occurred a year and a half ago in my electorate. It was the Warrnambool telephone exchange fire, which occurred on 22 November 2012 and which caused significant harm and damage not only to the exchange itself but to the people in south-west Victoria. The outage affected about 100,000 people in south-west Victoria, a region covering approximately 67,340 square kilometres.

The reason why I rise tonight to talk about this incident again—and I have talked about it previously in this place—is because RMIT and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network have put together a consumer and social impact analysis of the Warrnambool exchange fire. It is a very important document. Two authors, Dr Kaye Schofield from RMIT and Dr Mark Gregory from ACCAN, have done an excellent job putting together this report looking at the impact that this telephone exchange fire had on the local community. More importantly, they make recommendations of how government, how business and how individuals should prepare themselves for such future outages should they occur.

Let us not gild the lily here. What the south-west experienced when their exchange went down was nothing short of a wake-up call for the rest of the Australian community of how reliant we are now on telecommunications. Basically, it shut down all the commerce in south-west Victoria, it shut down emergency services, it shut down people's ability to make important life changing phone calls. This was incredible and extraordinary in its reach and in the impact that it had.

One of the things that we must see is that the rest of the Australian community takes note of this and puts in place the policies that are required to ensure that if this type of event occurs anywhere else in Australia that communities are prepared for it. The sad thing was that south-west Victoria was not fully prepared when it occurred on 22 November 2012. Even though it occurred in Warrnambool, to give you a sense of the disruption that it had, that morning I was meant to be doing a radio interview at my local ABC radio station at 7:20 from Hamilton. I could not do that radio interview because the ABC network could not function because of the telephone exchange fire. I then had to go and see the podiatrist about my foot. After having seen the podiatrist, I went to pay the account at 08:45 but I could not pay that account with my credit card because eftpos was down in that business. As I subsequently found out, eftpos was down in all the businesses not only in Hamilton but in Camperdown, in Portland and in Warrnambool as well. It also impacted on the ATM so nobody was able to get cash out. It literally brought the community to a standstill. So this is an important report.

As Telstra noted in its review this situation, 135 exchange services, 85 schools, 20 hospitals, 27 police stations, 92 fire stations and 14 SES services were affected by the outage. The one remaining telecommunication service in the region was the Optus 3G mobile network. Having spoken to Optus after the event, it was extraordinary that people, so desperately in need of communicating, rushed the Optus shop. They had to go to Ballarat to start shipping in telecommunications equipment so that they could feed the consumer demand. That is how reliant we are now on our telecommunications network.

The financial cost to the region was very hard to determine but the state government thought the financial impact was close to about $1 million a day. Any community cannot cope over a long period of time with that type of cost. It was interesting to see how a regional community and smaller regional communities were able to cope with this. It made me think that if a similar event occurred in an urban scenario where there are not the community networks which, fortunately, we have in regional and rural Australia, the impact could be twice as devastating.

The report prepared by RMIT and ACCAN contains some recommendations. It also surveyed responses. Some key elements of those were that 94.6 per cent of respondents suffered some inconvenience related to a business transaction; 69.8 per cent were unable or found it difficult to make vital purchases such as food or fuel; 86.5 per cent were unable to communicate with friends or family; and 24 per cent were unable to conduct business and had to shut down for some period of time. So businesses literally had to close. Over 60 per cent felt that the outage had a negative impact on community life. The authors came up with five recommendations, which are in the report. They are very good recommendations. Because of time constraints, I will not go into those.

Importantly, the report also came up with some recommendations with regard to survival plans, which other communities could learn from. There is a telecommunications survival plan for individuals, government and business. These are just single pages, but they provide very important information for government, business and members of the community to consider if a telephone exchange or any other event causes a communication outage. As we found out in the south-west, the impact can be holistic and it can be way, way beyond what anyone would expect.

One reason that I want to table this report tonight is so that I can put these plans on the record here in the House. I encourage the government and others to make sure that communities are aware of these.

In summary, we should not underestimate the importance of telecommunications in today's modern society. It impacts every part of our lives, every part of the community's life, every part of government's ability to communicate with local communities and every part of how business transacts with its local communities. If there is damage to telecommunications networks, none of us should underestimate the impact it will have not only on us personally but also on our communities. This report is an important document when it comes to considering the impact that the Warrnambool Exchange fire had on my local community. I ask that the House take the time to read and consider this report and the implications of it. It is wide reaching and it could impact on any of us in this House as we go about doing our duties as local members. Mr Deputy Speaker, I seek leave to table this report.

Leave granted.

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