Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education, Childcare, Women and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on an issue very important to my electorate and to many rural and regional areas in Victoria. We saw 173 people lose their lives to bushfires this year. Two of those people were from my electorate. They were doing what so many residents usually do: staying at home to defend their properties. The February fire was the third fire in six years to ravage some parts of my electorate in north-east Victoria. The 2003 fires left their mark, as emotional scar tissue, on the psyches of many people who lived and worked in the area and those who fought the fires.

Also, obviously, the fires left their mark on the landscape. Over 30,000 hectares were burnt in the Beechworth fire this year, and this was in addition to 900,000 hectares burnt during the 2003 and 2006 fires. Long after the cameras have gone and the media attention has faded away, these scars and effects are still there. I rose in the House, as did many others, in February this year to speak on the condolence motion for the Victorian bushfire victims. I said:

It is not the first time telecommunications has become an issue with bushfires across Australia, but we need to learn the lessons and learn them quickly.

We have seen both the Rudd government and the Brumby government offer uncapped and unconditional financial support to the victims of the February fires. As recently as October, the Prime Minister and the Victorian Premier joined together to announce support for fire-affected areas. The Prime Minister earlier this year said:

This government will be a partner for the long term in the rebuilding of each of the communities.

He went on to say:

We must do all that is possible through this commission so that we properly prepare for the future.

While financial support is obviously very important to help communities rebuild their lives, we also need to learn from this disastrous event, which is something that the Victorian government has failed to do in the past in relation to the bushfire threat, to the disappointment and anguish of many Victorians. As Mr Bruce Esplin, Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner, said after the release of the 2009 Bushfires Royal Commission interim report:

I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t frustrated in seeing the similarities between what I said in 2003 and what the commission said in 2009.

One of the issues of critical concern to north-east Victoria is access to communications and this issue was raised in the most recent interim report of the royal commission. They recommended in 4.8:

The Australian Government, Council of Australian Governments and the State determine whether it is technically possible to implement the second phase of the national telephony-based warning system (that is, the delivery of warning messages to mobile phones based on the physical location of a handset at the time of the emergency) with a view to implementation for the 2009–10 bushfire season.

Despite promising that a warning system would be in place by the start of the 2009-10 bushfire season, the Brumby government has now conceded that the system is weeks away from testing. While a national early warning system is important, the fundamental issue that is often overlooked is the fact that many parts of Victoria, and particularly north-east Victoria, do not receive adequate mobile telephone coverage.

We saw the Victorian Premier claim in the media that both the Victorian government and the Victorian royal commission have made representations to the federal government on the issue of telecommunications black spots, but effectively the Premier has washed his hands of the telecommunications issue. We saw the extraordinary statement by the emergency services minister, Bob Cameron, to calls for improved telecommunications in black spot areas when he said:

Ultimately it’s a matter really for the telcos as to what they do and obviously … over the years we’ve seen continued expansion of coverage and I suspect going into the future with technology changes that will continue to occur.

But if you live in one of those … areas you have to factor that in to your own individual fire plan.

Thanks for all the care and concern, Mr Cameron, and I say that obviously with some sarcasm. People all over my electorate regularly contact me as they are frustrated with inadequate mobile coverage, and we have seen this coverage worsen since the switchover from the CDMA to the Next G network. The government has been incapable of keeping its promise to hold Telstra accountable to its guarantee that the Next G coverage would be as good as, if not better than, the CDMA network. The government needs to fulfil its promise. It needs to hold Telstra accountable to its guarantee. I have many constituents who have written to me saying that their coverage has become poorer since the switchover. (Time expired)