Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I recently had the pleasure of spending time with him in his electorate to see the range of communications initiatives benefiting the Hunter community. Improving connectivity is a top priority for the Albanese government. High-quality, reliable communications services play a vital role for the economic and social inclusion of communities and especially for safety for those living and working in regional Australia as well as in our outer suburbs. That's why Labor took to the election our Better Connectivity Plan for Rural and Regional Australia. True to our commitment, our budget boosted regional telecommunications funding by $800 million compared to the last budget of the previous government.

A critical element of our plan is $400 million to expand mobile coverage and improve the resilience of mobile networks and communications systems during natural disasters. This stream includes $100 million dedicated to resilience measures, which will help deliver improvements to the reliability of networks and their ability to withstand and recover more quickly from natural disasters.

It's useful to understand what this can mean in practice. Right now, as honourable members across the chamber are well aware, there are communities across the country who are in the midst of devastating floods. Many constituents of those honourable members will be struggling to connect to the internet or get a mobile signal to contact their loved ones, to call for help or to receive emergency information. Our resilience measures will help to remedy just that. This includes improved reliability of backup power sources for telco facilities, and these include innovative battery and solar solutions. We will also focus on increasing the diversity of transmission routes, meaning that critical sites will be connected to the network through more than one path so, if one path fails, it's less likely to bring down the entire site.

My department has also commenced consultation on the Improving Mobile Coverage Round of the Mobile Black Spot Program. This progresses our election commitments to address mobile coverage and capacity issues in 54 locations where inadequate service had been identified by communities, local councils and mobile carriers. And we've committed $39.1 million to further rounds of the Peri-Urban Mobile Program, which will deliver increased coverage and capacity in our rapidly growing outer suburban areas. Our investment will also expand the program to urban areas with a population of over 100,000. These include areas like Geelong, Wollongong, Cairns and Newcastle.

The Albanese government is committed to better connectivity for Australians because good connectivity isn't simply a nice-to-have; it is an essential service for our economy, for our quality of life and, most of all, for the safety of our citizens.

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