Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commend some of the comments at the outset of the member for Makin. It is a big issue we are trying to deal with, when you have people in regional areas saying, 'Unless we get the financial assistance grant system working properly, looking after the more remote regional government areas, these council areas will not be viable or sustainable.' It seems ridiculous that a place such as the Gold Coast or the centre of Sydney—the Sydney regional council—has a financial assistance grant yet you have a places such as Bingara or Uralla out in the regions that are struggling to look after their roads. These big councils would make vastly more out of parking fines. We don't have that attribute in remote and regional areas. Everybody has been saying that we should be adjusting the financial assistance grants process. We keep talking about it but we never seem to do it. Maybe it is something for the astute people as we go towards the coming election to come up with a policy on that one.

When I first got into politics in 2004, the big issue then was the final privatisation of Telstra. It had been half privatised by the Labor Party. The government had privatised about 49 per cent of it and wanted to privatise the rest. It was Treasurer Costello at that stage. I think the logic behind it was they used the money from the privatisation of Telstra to pay off what was at that point in time about $80 billion of debt, so Australia would not have any debt after that. That was the trick we used to get ourselves out.

However, in regional areas we were very concerned about this. The reason we were concerned was we just don't trust people to look off after us when they privatise something and say that is the market and that will work. I was in the invidious position because the coalition had won four Senate seats in Queensland and I had actually had, at that point in time, the Liberal Party standing against me to try and beat me. When I arrived down here, I was not really part of the team as I should have been, and the biggest issue was that they needed my vote for the final privatisation of Telstra. I was completely new at my job. Neither I nor any of my staff had been in politics before, so it was rather intense. Trying to get the agreements through, with the universal service obligation, the network reliability framework and the customer service guarantee—a myriad things—and trying to work out what sort of money needed to be put aside so there were some protections for regional areas was an immense task. To be quite frank, I wasn't getting any assistance from either side of politics, and I was having to rely on people external to this building to give me some sort of guidance on where I'd go on that.

I don't think we came up with the perfect solution, but I could see that, inevitably, if I didn't come to some sort of agreement at that point in time, they were just going to go around me and use somebody else. So an agreement that did its very best to look after regional Australia was the one I had to take. The Labor Party had already privatised half of Telstra. There was absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't have it in their minds to sell another one per cent of it if they had the opportunity. It was just a matter of time and trying to do the best you could at that spot.

To this day, our office and, I think, many regional people's offices remind you of a front desk for Telstra. Any complaint about telecommunications seem to walk through our doors, and there are many complaints. As this is a bill to deal with consumer safeguards—and I had a fundamental part in bringing about consumer safeguards back in 2005—it is disappointing that we just get these weasel words.

We were given a guarantee that, when 3G shut down, people would not lose service. Now, there was initially a thing called CDMA, Deputy Speaker Goodenough; you probably remember it. It had very low volume but an incredibly good footprint for voice. When that shut down, it went to a thing called 2G—a smaller area but with more data. Then it was 3G, a smaller area again but with more data. Now we're heading to 4G and 5G. But, as they shut down 3G, a lot of people who used to get voice—and this is imperative—don't get it anymore.

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