Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have heard from many speakers this afternoon on the importance of regional connectivity and regional communications. I think we are all agreed that it is a critical issue. As a member representing a very large electorate, 860,000 square kilometres, I think I'm in a pretty good position to comment. I want to highlight some of the reasons it's such an important issue for regional people.

Firstly, the liveability of our communities: people who live in our regional and remote communities deserve to have access to the enjoyable things in life, just like everybody else. If they come home from work they need to have the capacity to be able to turn on the TV and watch a streaming service, whether it be Netflix, Stan or one of those sorts of services. So liveability is important.

There is business. There's a lot of business conducted in regional communities across my electorate, whether they be mining communities, farming communities or individual farmers. Some of these are quite large businesses, and they need to have the capacity to conduct their business over the internet.

And of course, possibly the most important issue about regional connectivity is the safety of our regional communities. We've seen bushfires, recently, where people need to be absolutely informed of the situation on the ground at a given time. Unfortunately, we have road accidents along the coast. Unfortunately, all too often, we have people washed into the water, and so we need to have that connectivity across our regional communities.

That connectivity is made up of two components. The first of those components is phones and mobile phone connectivity. I am very, very proud that my electorate of O'Connor has been the major beneficiary of the Mobile Black Spot Program. We had the member for Grey speaking a few moments ago. He said his electorate had received 30 mobile phone towers under our three current rounds. I can report that the seat of O'Connor has received 129 mobile phone black spot towers. While I'll claim all of the credit, the fact is that the previous Barnett Western Australian government co-funded with the Commonwealth government many of those towers, which gave Western Australia a big head start when we were applying for those mobile phone black spots. We are getting near the end of that program. We're down to the last few towers.

There's a couple where I'm very proud of the work that I've done to get them across the line. The mobile phone tower at Ocean Beach in Denmark, one of the premier holiday locations in Western Australia—we had 11 sites rejected by the Denmark shire before we could finally find a suitable site for that particular mobile phone tower. I know that the owners of the Ocean Beach caravan park, where I take my family every year, are over the moon that, finally, the up to 3,000 people that are in that caravan park at the peak of summer will have a mobile phone signal. So that's a great result.

The other tower that caused us a lot of angst and took some work to get across the line was the tower at Salmon Holes. Salmon Holes is a very popular fishing spot just around the coast from Albany. Unfortunately, in the last decade we've seen six people washed off the rocks there and lose their life. The coroner had recommended very strongly that better communications be put into that site. Once again, trying to find a suitable location that was compliant with the Department of Parks and Wildlife's national park, which surrounds that area, was fairly challenging. Thankfully AMSA, who owned a decommissioned lighthouse site on the coast, handed that over to DPAW. They have now made that old lighthouse available for us to mount a mobile phone tower. So we are finally going to get the connectivity off the south coast that we so badly need.

In the last 30 seconds, I want to talk about Sky Muster and Sky Muster Plus. The Sky Muster service is not a Rolls-Royce service—I'll be the first to agree with that. It's much better than the satellite service that we inherited when I was first elected in 2013. The Sky Muster Plus initiative is going to give families much more data and much more access to data to conduct those daily tasks like homework, business and so on, without impacting on their data usage.

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