Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

For metropolitan constituents, it might be difficult to believe, but the single most inquired about issue in my electorate offices day in, day out over the course of more than a decade has been mobile phone connectivity. That dichotomy, sadly, is growing in our country as telcos focus their efforts on providing greater speeds, better reliability—effectively, better services—for those people that live in the heavily populated parts of our country while they turn their back on those people that live in rural, regional and remote Australia. So that gap is broadening day by day.

You heard the member for New England saying that what we don't want is for a world in which our heavily populated areas, our metropolitan centres, are serviced by our national telcos, while those of us who live in the bush have to rely on alternative forms of technology—Starlink and these other things. People are moving in that direction via necessity, but it's also broadening another gap, and that's the disadvantage gap, because those alternative forms of technology are much more expensive and are available to fewer and fewer individuals in an economic sense.

I'm really pleased that the member for Bradfield is here, because, I've got to say, over the term of the former coalition government, he served for much of that period as the minister for telecommunications. As a bloke who has lived most of his life, if not all of his life, in the city, he got it. I expect he got it because there were people like me knocking on his door—and member for New England and others. We may have been an annoyance, but something got through because there were successive rounds of the Mobile Black Spot Program, a program that he himself developed, a program that those opposite, by the way, cut and underfunded.

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