Brett Raguse (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk a little bit today about the issues that I spoke about on previous occasions—pensioners, their concerns and their inability to make ends meet. Those that I mentioned specifically on that occasion were single pensioners who were looking at increasing rents—and that pressure has certainly applied in my electorate of Forde. It is a huge growth corridor. These people are under a lot of pressure.

During the eight weeks away from parliament, I convened about 28 community meetings in my electorate looking at a whole range of issues, including the concerns of our older Australians and those people who are receiving certain benefits. As you can understand as members, we are all getting lots and lots of contact from people who are particularly hurting in our community. Also on that last occasion that I spoke I talked about an approach by a number of groups to petition this parliament, basically to put some information before the House to detail their specific concerns. I seek leave to table what is a properly made petition in accordance with the standing orders.

Leave granted.

The petition read as follows—

To the Honourable Speaker and Members of the House of Representatives.

This petition of the disability and senior pensioners of Logan, Bethania, Beenleigh.

Draws to the attention of the House that we are in need of a rise in our rate of payment of pension. Because of Price rises in Rent, Food, Fuel and Prescriptions. People who have many health issues are becoming more ill, because they cannot afford special food, fresh food or meat. (e.g. diabetics, coeliac, heart problems and many more, which can all kill if not managed properly.) Prescriptions now cost $5.00 each and the Government is only giving us $5.80 per fortnight, which still only buys one script per fortnight.

We therefore ask the House to increase our pension in two ways. One by increasing our Prescription money to $10 per week. Two give us a food voucher for $ 50 a week (which should be for Woolworths or Coles where most people shop). As either of the increases would not affect rent payments to increase.

from 219 citizens.

Petition received.

Further to that, that petition details some specific concerns of over 200 signatories and I would certainly like the tabling to be part of my attempt to bring some of those concerns to the attention of the House.

There are other issues for the electorate of Forde, and it was interesting to hear the member for New England talk about his issues when it comes to telecommunications. While I certainly have sympathy for the member for New England and his regional issues relating to that sort of infrastructure, in the electorate of Forde we are in the vicinity of a major capital city, being Brisbane. In fact, at the northern end we are less than 40 kilometres from the centre of Brisbane.

The furthest point south is probably around 100-odd kilometres south of Brisbane on the Border Ranges, an area called Running Creek. I spent some time in Running Creek fairly recently, looking at the lack of infrastructure that exists in that area. There are cables on the side of the road, cables that are tied up to fences and cables that have been chewed by some of the cattle that graze in that particular area. This says that, while as a government we have committed to a rollout of major broadband infrastructure, the fact is that we have some basic services that are still in need of immediate attention. I take the point of the member for New England, who talked about some of those specific issues, what we need to do and the fact that the privatisation of many of the telcos, or the opportunity for further privatisation, is a concern. As I said, Running Creek is an area to the far south, and we need to ensure that we have certain infrastructure provided prior to our broadband rollout.

However, a little further into the electorate, in an area only a little bit south of Beenleigh called Buccan, people have major issues with getting basic services. I will give the example of an application to get a service made back in April this year. This is a landline service, by the way, and the service will not be provided until 15 January next year. The current systems are just not good enough. It does beg the question of what our systems are currently doing. It begs the question about our Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and how well they are resourced to take these issues on board.

I have been an advocate for this for a long time. In fact, it got to a point where there were so many issues with broadband internet access in the electorate that we put together our own report on the seat of Forde. Only yesterday I presented that to our communications minister. I would also like to seek leave to table that report today.

Leave granted.

That report goes into a lot of detail. I would be happy if other members want to have access to that particular report because it details the issue and suggests responses on how we may be able to deal with the concerns that we have with our infrastructure as it currently exists, without the intended major rollout of infrastructure. So there are two major issues: pensions, of course—and we all understand that—but also the telecommunications industry, the lack of current facilities and services and our desire to have those fixed.