Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Casey has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the amendment moved by the member for Casey to the second reading of the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010. This bill will enable the delivery of digital television services by satellite to viewers who cannot receive an adequate terrestrial signal for the digital television services licensed for the areas in which they live. While the coalition does not oppose the bill, we have concerns that only 87 of the 698 self-help retransmission sites across Australia have been identified for upgrading. Television viewers in regional, rural and remote areas deserve the same access to television as their city counterparts, ideally through an upgrade of terrestrial service and not through satellite.

This legislation was referred to the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee for inquiry and report. One of the concerns which was raised in many of the Senate inquiry submissions is the cost of installing satellite receiving equipment for households in regional and remote Australia, such as households in my electorate of Forrest and in your electorate of Grey, Mr Deputy Speaker Ramsey. The cost to such households includes the cost of installation, the equipment required and how and when people will know if they require satellite equipment.

On this note, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has stated that households requiring satellites are expected to pay, on average, $650 for equipment and installation, of which $400 will be subsidised by the government, meaning that householders will still be approximately $250 out of pocket. Mr Andy Townend from the Digital Switchover Taskforce has stated that the new satellite service would create a situation where householders who wish to receive both the full range of services available on the new satellite network and subscription TV would need two satellite dishes and two set-top boxes. If this is the case, it will cost such householders in our areas even more.

My regional and rural electorate of Forest will be the last area in Australia to switch over, with the switch-over date set for between 1 July and 31 December 2013. I have been contacted all the same by licensed installers from my electorate. One of them shared with me his concerns about the digital switch-over from his perspective. One of the issues he raised was that, if no towers are being upgraded in my electorate and his part of the world—which I believe is correct—installers must be notified whether, when a new house is built in the region, they are required to fit the house with an antenna or a satellite.

The installer informed me that presently most new homeowners are choosing to have antennas installed, as a cheaper option. However, if in two years they can get extra channels via satellite, it would be more cost-effective to have the satellite option installed now. Even though digital television may not be available in my area until 2013, installers and homeowners need to know now what equipment they should be installing in houses now in preparation for that future. This would be a far more efficient and cost-effective process.

Another area of uncertainty for my electorate in this bill is that currently the Forrest electorate has digital transmission for ABC; however, there is no confirmation from broadcasters of whether or not GWN and WIN will also have their own digital transmission towers. In an article in the Adelaide Advertiser on 9 March 2010, regional network WIN raised concerns at the cost of paying for the digitalisation of its Western Australian and South Australian networks. In the article, WIN owner Bruce Gordon is quoted as saying:

We are looking to the Government to say, ‘You’re going to have to help because we’ll go broke quick enough without having to buy 68 new transmitters for WA to go digital.’

That means that residents in my electorate may need an antenna to be able to access the ABC and a satellite to access GWN or WIN if these networks do not have transmitters in the region. People who currently have satellite dishes are being bombarded with free-to-air adverts about channels that they currently cannot receive. Eastern states and even Perth residents may be able to view the new channels being promoted, but south-west residents cannot.

I recently received an email from a constituent in my electorate who is quite angered by ‘the state of the commercial TV networks who seem to be making a joke out of the conversion to digital TV’. My constituent highlighted that, when the commercial TV services went digital in Perth, the introduction of the subchannels such as GO!, 7Two and One HD saw a number of programs move from the main channels to the subchannels. This resulted in some programs previously available on the commercial TV channels in regional WA simply disappearing and being inaccessible for those people. Some can also no longer enjoy the picture quality that a digital TV set-up provides.

My office has received a number of calls from residents in response to an article in a local newspaper, the Bunbury Mail, on 3 December, where GWN and WIN stated that they have no intention of converting to digital until close to the changeover date of 2013. They are concerned that there may be a reason or an excuse to delay further when that date actually approaches.

The Mount Lennard transmitter in my electorate serves most of the south-west, with a coverage of over 150,000 people. This is a seriously large audience. It really does not make sense that there are no plans to upgrade this transmitter to digital in the near future.

I am also concerned as to how the government will regulate installers. We certainly do not want to see a repeat of the process we saw in the Home Insulation Program. We cannot afford to have a repeat of that bungled program.

As these issues highlight, people right across Australia deserve certainty regarding the digital switch-over—when it is going to be rolled out, exactly how much it is going to cost and how much it is going to cost them. The Labor government must do the simple hard work and provide the necessary levels of funding and on-ground support to ensure viewers are not left without a television picture when the analog signal is switched off.

The coalition has always said that local content currently available, including news, sport and community information relevant to each region should continue to be available in digital. The government’s plan will be judged by the actual delivery of digital services on television screens right around Australia and certainly in my electorate of Forrest.

In concluding, we certainly have some concerns that only 87 of the 698 self-help retransmission sites across Australia have been identified for upgrading and that there is still an amount of uncertainty surrounding this bill. Television viewers in regional, rural and remote areas—such as the residents in my electorate of Forrest—deserve the same access to television as their city counterparts. As we all know, with so many farmers and people engaged in small business in those areas, access to services like this play a critical part in their lives and often in their businesses. I support the amendments proposed by the shadow minister.

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Television is very important to all Australians, particularly for those who live in regional communities. They want to have satisfactory signal and a choice of programs. They want to be able to see the programs that they want to see. They want to be connected with their local community. They expect that to happen efficiently, seamlessly and reliably. The close down of the analog television network is causing a great deal of apprehension in regional Australia. There are many communities that are not sure whether they will have television reception at all after this closure has been effected. And they have reason to be concerned about the way in which this government is handling the changeover.

Labor has a dismal record when it comes to communication services in regional Australia. They have a record of closing networks down without any regard for the people outside the capital cities who are adversely affected. Remember when the Hawke-Keating government closed the analog phone network and replaced it with GSM? There were tens of thousands of country people left with poor mobile phone coverage. Indeed, the GSM network failed to meet the expectations of and promises made by the Labor government. When the coalition was elected, the CDMA network was opened up, largely at the prompting at one of my predecessors, Tim Fischer. The CDMA network filled some of the gaps and it did in fact provide a much better coverage in regional Australia. But Labor had left regional Australians with a seriously defective mobile phone coverage.

Six months after the election of the Rudd government, they closed the CDMA network, so it has gone now as well. Again, we have an inferior signal in many parts of regional Australia. I do not live in a remote part of Australia. My electorate is all east of the Great Dividing Range. Yet there are many parts of my electorate where it is impossible to get mobile phone coverage. Even in my home, I struggle to get good coverage on many occasions. And it is because the new signal is inferior in many regards, particularly in the distances that it is able to cover, and so regional Australians are left without the kind of mobile phone network that they should have.

Then we get to broadband and the extension of broadband facilities at high speeds to all Australians. Prior to the last election, Labor said that it would deliver fibre to the node to 98 per cent of Australians at a cost of $4.7 billion and that it would start by Christmas of 2008. Then in April 2009, it changed the promise. Only 90 per cent of Australians would be covered by the high-speed broadband network and the cost had blown out to $43 billion. Two million Australians were to be excised from the promise and every town with fewer than a thousand people was excised from the promise that Labor had made before the last election.

Putting aside the dishonesty of the broken promise, the reality was that once again Labor had demonstrated that it did not consider high-speed broadband for regional Australians to be important. If you lived in a little town, you were going to miss out. You would get a second-class service. So people are seriously concerned about Labor’s track record when it comes to communications.

They also axed the Communications Fund. This fund had been set aside especially to deliver new technology to regional Australia and to fill in some of the black spots that occur when new technology is rolled out. That money was put aside. At the time it was put aside, it was put aside in sacred trust so that regional Australians could have some confidence that they would share in new technology developments in communications. But in fact that fund has been raided by the government to try and prop up its broadband. Regional Australians have got nothing.

Indeed, since Labor was elected, there has not been a single cent of government money provided to fill in black spots in the mobile phone network. That is shameful. Obviously Labor members living in their city electorates and cabinet ministers—all of whom come from city electorates—have probably got pretty good mobile phone reception. But there are many small communities that do not. The black spots program was filling in those gaps—gaps that were not economical for the major telecommunications companies to service but which are important if you believe in equality of service and a capacity to cover the whole of the nation.

It used to annoy me to see Telstra ads boasting about how you could go from one end of the country to the other and stay totally connected to Telstra mobile phones. I could not go more than two or three kilometres from my own home before running out of reception. This government thinks that that is acceptable and it is not prepared to spend any money at all on filling in those gaps. This was a program that the previous government had funded faithfully over a period of time and it had made a big difference. It certainly filled in the worst of the black spots, but there are many more that still need to be filled in.

Labor is now coming to us with the news that they are going to close down analogue television and covert to digital. Is it any wonder that people in regional Australia are suspicious and concerned about whether, once again, they are going to be allowed to fall through the cracks? This bill proposes to authorise the establishment of a satellite service to cover some of those gaps. But unfortunately the government has been unable to explain to any of us how it is going to work, when it will be available and under what terms and conditions it will be made available to consumers of television in Australia.

I want to use the time I have in this speech to ask some questions that I hope the minister will respond to when he sums up the legislation. Sadly, the minister is not here but I notice that there are some of his advisers here. I am asking these questions in good faith because I have been unable to get to a stage where I can get answers to the questions. I will get to them a little later in my remarks.

I guess the core of the problem is that even under the old analogue network there were some parts of the country that could not be covered by television signals. There were 698 self-help and black-spot transmitters put in place to fill in some of those locations which were not covered by the primary transmitters. That delivered television to lots of small communities—they were not all in the country; some of them were in the cities, because there were black spots also in the cities. But the government has said that it is only going to upgrade, or arrange for upgrading for, 87 of those 698. They are going to be funded by the television stations themselves. That leaves 600 communities left in the lurch. There is some suggestion that other transmitters may cover some of those areas but we cannot have a great deal of confidence that that coverage will be complete.

Why isn’t the government converting all 698 transmitters? Why isn’t it? The 87 are costing $18 million, we are told. The government is allocating $40 million a year to this new satellite service. For that money you could have converted the whole 698 and, over a few years, put in another 698 if there were areas where reception was inferior. Why will we have a satellite service that will have significant implications for regional areas, particularly with the loss of localism in their programming?

The digital signal has different characteristics to analogue. It has a shorter range, generally. It performs quite poorly in wet weather and in some other weather conditions. That will be a particular issue in northern Queensland and at times of cyclones and weather disturbance when television reception can be particularly important. The digital signal cuts out dramatically. Most of us have already had to experience the situation of watching a digital television program which pixelates all over the place or simply shows a ‘no signal’ sign. Indeed, I have noticed it happen in Canberra over the last couple of days, so it happens in lots of places. This is a fundamental issue with the digital signal.

What about those people who are on the edges of the signal and are going to miss out altogether? Unfortunately, in August 2008 the government suspended its digital TV black spots checking program in non-metropolitan areas. So there is now no-one going around finding the spots where the digital television reception will not be available. How do we know which areas are going to be blacked out and which ones are not? Senator Conroy was asked this question in senate estimates, and his answer, to his great shame, was, ‘They’ll wake up in the morning and find they have a blank screen.’ So Senator Conroy’s test as to whether people are going to get digital television reception is that they will wake up in the morning and have a blank screen. Frankly, that is not good enough. It is not good enough for the cities and it is not good enough for the country. I do not think the government can rest on such a very flimsy approach to checking what areas will get television reception and what areas will not.

For country people, television is particularly important. They do not have a daily newspaper delivered to their doors. They are lucky if they get a weekly newspaper. They do not have a club to visit down the road if they want to enjoy some entertainment. They cannot go to a football game in a giant taxpayer funded stadium. They do not have a video shop down the road that they can simply walk along to if their television blacks out. They depend on this for a great deal of their family entertainment and information.

So any situation that results in significant numbers of families—or for that matter, one family—having the television reception which they have enjoyed for 10, 20 or 30 years suddenly not available, is unacceptable. It is quite clear that the government has not taken this concern seriously. It is quite obvious that there has not been adequate planning for this conversion, and there does not seem to be a willingness even to understand the difficulties that are going to arise. For instance, the government does not know how many households are going to require the new satellite service.

On 5 January, in a press release, the minister said that there were 247,000 households that would require this satellite service, but on budget night it was reduced to 130,000 households. Does that mean they got it wrong in the first place or is this new satellite service now going to be different from the one that was announced on 5 January? I suspect it is, because the language that is in the press release on budget night is very different from the language that was in the earlier press announcements. For instance, the original advice was that there were to be three satellite services: one covering south-east Australia—New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania; one covering Queensland and the Northern Territory; and one covering Western Australia. There were also to be three regional news services provided through a dedicated news channel. Is that still the situation, or has the Western Australian satellite been dropped out altogether? There is no reference to Western Australia any more, and in fact there is a suggestion that Western Australians are only going to receive a signal in the usual way from their regional channels.

When is the satellite going to be available? When is the transmission going to start to occur? What will be the source of the eastern states’ programs? This is a question that I hope the minister might be able to respond to, like the other one. Will we still have three separate satellite prints or are we now only going to have two? In some instances is it only going to be one print? There was a statement in the press release on budget night that high definition services will now be provided by a combined zone covering the northern and southern zones. Is there now only going to be one service for high definition and only two services for standard definition? Has the situation changed, and is that the reason that the number of households that are going to benefit from this service has dropped, almost by half?

I am particularly concerned about the source of the programming for the satellite service for south-eastern Australia. Is it going to come from Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart or Adelaide? Are people who live in South Australia going to have listen to New South Wales state news, watch Stateline from New South Wales and watch the Rugby League during peak viewing times? Are they going to have to listen to New South Wales weather reports, or Melbourne weather reports? I gather they are all going to get the same one. We have been told that the service for South Australians—and you will be interested in this, Mr Deputy Speaker Ramsey—will be based on Sydney time. That of itself seems to me to be an inconvenience that ought to be avoided. I ask in particular: where is the signal going to come from and how many viewers are not going to be able to watch programs of interest to their state?

It seems that the high-definition service is all going to come from a single satellite—in other words, even people in the Northern Territory and Queensland will get the Sydney programs. Bear in mind that, at the present time, Queenslanders who want to watch high-definition news get the Sydney news—not Brisbane news but Sydney news. The ABC has not bothered to provide any high-definition programming sourced from Queensland, so Queenslanders only get Sydney programming. Is that what country people have to look forward to in the future? The government has acknowledged that there is an issue with regional news services, and everyone wants to get their own local news service.

I have some more questions about this dedicated news channel. Will all local news services be available on the channel? Some areas have more than one regional news—will they all be available? Will people be able to get the news services from other towns? Will they get the local advertising and the local special programs as well, or just the news? And what about Western Australians—have they been left out of this local news service altogether? I think those are perfectly reasonable questions for us to ask.

I have also mentioned the issue of when the satellite service will be operational. It is only 48 days away from the closure of analog television in Mildura. Mildura viewers will have to have satellites and set-top boxes installed and operating by 30 June, but I have been informed recently that the set-top boxes are only going to be arriving from China on 14 June. So the people of Mildura are only going to have from 14 June to 30 June to find out whether they need a set-top box and, if they do, to get it installed. Do we know whether the set-top boxes are even going to work? Apparently it was only quite recently that decisions were made about the technology. I have heard that regional channels still do not quite know how they are going to get their news signal to the satellite and how that is going to be funded and organised.

It is quite clear that the government does not understand what is actually going on. I call on the minister tonight to give a commitment that the government will not turn off the analog television signals in Mildura or, for that matter, anywhere else in Australia until there is adequate coverage for all existing viewers. You cannot treat country people with such disdain as to simply close down their television signal without any option. To close down the analog signal in Mildura on 30 June is no longer realistic. People have had no opportunity to install set-top boxes, and they are not going to get that opportunity until just a few days before their signal is turned off. That is simply not good enough.

The reality is that television services are important to communities and we want to know how they will work. I do not think it is satisfactory for there to be just a single high-definition service for the whole of Australia. I do not think it is satisfactory that regional communities will have Sydney advertisements and Sydney programs transmitted to them. If someone is interested in buying a Holden, they do not want to know about the Holden dealer in Sydney; they want to know about the one in their own town. People want to know about the services that are available in their state and, in particular, their regional community. It seems that localism will be one of the casualties of this new satellite service.

I accept that there may be some people—although the government has, again, not made it clear—that will get services for the first time as a result of this. I am not sure whether people in city areas, in high-rise buildings et cetera, that have trouble with the digital signal are going to be able to access the satellite or whether only those communities that are on black spot transmitters are going to be upgraded. It would be far better if they upgraded the black spot transmitters.

This must be the first time a Labor government has done something first in the country and left the cities till later. Labor usually gives the good things to the cities first. This is one thing that they are delivering in the country, and for that reason I doubt it is a good thing. I think there are going to be serious problems, and the government has not owned up to them. I look forward to the minister’s response to the questions I have asked. I hope that there will be a seamless transition, but I am not at this stage confident, and that is why I support the amendment moved by the opposition. We call on the government to ensure that no one loses their signal over this changeover. (Time expired)

Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Conversion to digital television is the most fundamental change in broadcasting since the introduction of television more than 50 years ago. It will give viewers access to multiple high-definition channels and an expanded range of programs. I know that the coalition broadly supports this because we did a lot of work on this in previous years when in government. However, I would echo many of the comments of the member for Wide Bay, particularly in relation to regional and rural areas, because I represent many of those areas and outer suburban areas that we continue to have concerns about. We continue to have concerns about them because it appears this is another ham-fisted rollout by the federal government. I have a number of concerns to raise.

I was interested to read the press release of the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Conroy. He said:

All television viewers in Australia will now have access to the full range of free-to-air digital television services as a result of the new satellite television service.

I think there is some doubt about whether all Australians will have access to this service. That definitely remains to be seen. Certainly, a lot of people who are knowledgeable in this area doubt that it is a possibility.

In my electorate, I constantly echo the concerns of some of the of the member for Wide Bay’s constituents—the people of Lancelin and Northam, for example. Northam is only an hour and a half from the city and Lancelin is a couple of hours from the city. These are people who do not have postal services. They do not have newspaper deliveries. They do not get mobile reception and they do not get television reception. So they are cut-off. In a modern world and in a country like Australia, I think that is totally unacceptable. I have spoken in this place before about it and I have written to the minister about it.

In 1998, the foundations for digital television were laid for Australia to enter this realm of digital television, under the former coalition government, when the parliament passed legislation to establish the basic framework for conversion to digital television. Further legislation followed in 2000, setting out the operating rules, and more basic implementation legislation has progressed since. The progressive rollout of digital TV has already occurred, with many metropolitan viewers able to enjoy its benefits, but the final switchover is due to occur for Western Australia on 21 December 2013, at which point standard analogue reception will no longer be available. It is a long time to wait. As I said, a lot of my constituents do not have access to reasonable television reception now and it appears they will be waiting for at least another three years, if they get it at all.

Currently, the TV signals most people receive are from terrestrial towers. To broadcast digital TV, those towers need to be upgraded by the network providers; however, not all of these towers are actually being upgraded. There are 698 terrestrial tower sites around the country and I understand only 87 of those have been identified for upgrading. That is only 12.5 per cent. Advances in television antennae reception and the strength of the digital TV signal mean that the signal coverage will be larger than that of the analogue signal. However, there will be a large number of people who will not have the benefit of a terrestrial signal. Affected individuals will be in outlying suburban, rural and remote areas, for the most part—a description that applies to most of my electorate.

Instead, the government will fund the provision of a satellite service to broadcast digital TV. With a country as expansive as Australia, some sort of satellite signal to service black spots would be inevitable. However, the scope and cost of that should not be exorbitant. A cost-effective balance should be struck, but it appears that the government has decided to allot considerable funds and rollout the system without a simple cost-benefit analysis, much like the NBN. Simple, prudent cost investigations have taken a back seat. It is interesting to read the Senate inquiry’s report on this.

This fact has not been lost on industry. In its submission to the Senate inquiry on this legislation, which has just been completed, AUSTAR argued that it was surprised by preliminary funding estimates to support this project. The government has estimated its costs for funding the satellite network to be $40 million per annum, for the potential benefit of up to 247,000 households across Australia. Broadcast Australia, which is a commercial owner and operator of approximately 600 terrestrial broadcast facilities, questioned whether the appropriate balance has been reached by the government between the conversion of existing terrestrial sites to digital and satellite platform. Broadcast Australia’s submission argued:

… it is overwhelmingly in TV viewers’ interests that digital free to air TV services potentially available to homes from the satellite are made available through local digital terrestrial transmission facilities—unless it can be demonstrated it is simply not cost effective to provide the full range of terrestrial digital transmission facilities to achieve this.

The committee questioned officers from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy about what other solutions to digital TV black spots had been considered, and about the comparative costs and benefits of alternative options. Mr Andy Townsend, Deputy Secretary of Broadcasting and Digital Switchover, responded:

The government certainly looked at a number of different ways of meeting the problem of signal deficiencies. The satellite solution that has been formulated has been designed to provide the maximum number of services to people in the most cost-efficient way.

Note that he does not say all people. However, the department declined to provide the Senate committee with details of the models considered. If multiple models were considered, where is the proof? Surely, it would simply be a matter of producing the material on the models? We have been left in the dark. Broadcast Australia said:

[we are] unaware of … any cost benefit study that has underpinned the decision by government to spend $40 million per annum in 2010 dollar terms for each of the next 4 years … to provide the full range of so called Freeview services from the new satellite platform, compared with rolling out a greater number of digital terrestrial transmission TV facilities.

The Broadcast Australia representative also stated:

The second point I would like to emphasise is that we are not aware of how the balance between terrestrial and satellite has been arrived at by the government.

Senator Conroy’s Budget 2010 Digital Switchover press release champions the fact that the government has allotted $375.4 million over 12 years to provide transmission of digital free-to-air television services from the new satellite platform, but the department will not show the modelling used to demonstrate that this is the most cost-effective figure. To remedy the signal deficiency, individuals who cannot receive terrestrial signal will now be forced to purchase a satellite kit. This raises a number of concerns. How much will the individual have to pay to get the equipment and what is the cost of installation? And when will people know that they must purchase a satellite dish?

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy estimates that households should pay, on average, $650 for equipment and installation. The government will provide $400 in compensation to affected households and $550 to those in very remote areas. Already, that is $250 in out-of-pocket expenses. If the estimates of $280 for installation and $100 for the satellite dish are correct, I would caution that these figures may underestimate the actual cost. Some vendors are selling the necessary equipment for $600 plus installation, and regional areas are likely to experience much higher installation costs. I fear that the actual out-of-pocket expenses to householders will be much more than that estimated.

Another issue which could end up costing many regional and rural constituents unnecessarily is the lack of certainty over which method of digital reception—terrestrial or satellite—will be available. This is particularly concerning for residents near terrestrial towers which will not be upgraded but may be on the edge of the signal of other upgraded towers. In its submission to the Senate inquiry, Broadcast Australia confirmed this problem and cautioned that residents cannot be certain they will be within the new digital coverage footprint. They said:

Until the full suite of digital services are available at those sites, you cannot make an informed decision as to whether you are going to have digital terrestrial or you will need to buy, at a significantly higher cost, digital direct-to-home satellite services.

Essentially, viewers will not know until they attempt to switch to digital or the analog signal is switched off and they get a black screen—as the member for Wide Bay said and as the minister admitted at Senate estimates. This is the exact problem faced by one of my constituents. A resident in Northam, Western Australia, just a 90-minute drive east of Perth, wrote to me frustrated at the costs he has incurred to receive an intermittent digital TV signal. Spurred by advertising about making the switch, he did so. All of the digital stations he watches have broken, pixelated pictures or even a loss of signal. One television station he watches loses signal 70 per cent of the time. The constituent is frustrated that, just as he gets into a program, the signal is lost. Apart from being simply annoying, it also means that he misses out on his relaxation time. He consulted two independent antenna installation providers, who both assured him that the signal was at fault. I represented my constituent’s concern to the minister. In return correspondence, the minister’s adviser replied:

It appears that the constituent may be receiving fortuitous digital television reception form the broadcast site at Toodyay, which is located approximately 20 kilometres west of Northam. However, this is a low-powered site established to provide coverage only to viewers in Toodyay. The constituent is located outside of the coverage area for this site and this may be the reason why he has intermittent loss of signal and poor digital reception for the commercial free-to-air digital channels.

The letter goes on to suggest that, in the interim, ‘the options are to access analog reception from the Northam site, or possibly to continue to receive the poor digital signals from the site at Toodyay’. So the options available at the moment, after the constituent has spent a considerable amount of money to upgrade to receive digital television reception, are a poor digital signal that is not worth watching or no digital TV, reverting to what he had before.

This is a very unsatisfactory situation for many constituents in my electorate. This problem will be faced by many more constituents around the country unless the government can more effectively communicate who will require a satellite system. That process should start now, as people are switching, not six months before the official turn-off date at the end of 2013. By that time, many will have found out, at their own expense, that they are required to pay even more money to access free-to-air television. Even those who currently have a set-top box and satellite dish to receive pay TV will have to pay more if they require a satellite service. This issue was raised by Ms Heap, from AUSTAR, at the Senate inquiry. She commented:

We do not want to inconvenience AUSTAR’s existing customers by them having to pay for a second satellite dish and set-top box, when our set-top box should be completely capable of delivering that to them today.

Mr Andy Townend, Deputy Secretary, Broadcasting and Digital Switchover, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, agreed that the new satellite service would create a situation where householders who wished to receive the full range of services available on the new satellite network, in addition to subscription TV, would require two satellite dishes and two set-top boxes. In an advanced economy, with cutting edge technology, it truly is laughable that a person should have to purchase two separate set-top boxes and two separate satellite dishes when either system should be capable. I find it incredible that such a situation has been able to prevail.

But the department obviously does not see the extra cost, the extra burden and the illogical nature of this to be a problem. Mr Townend argued that having the two necessary sets of equipment ‘would be the consumers’ choice, and that would be a completely separate matter’. People in outlying rural and regional areas do not deserve to be the victims of their geography. The need for a satellite service is acknowledged, but it should not come at an unnecessary cost to individuals. It is obvious that the government has not put in the appropriate amount of effort to identify those who would be disadvantaged by not upgrading more terrestrial towers. There is no evidence of costings or modellings or a simple cost-benefit analysis. This is a continuing feature of the current government and especially this particular department. With $375.4 million being allotted to the digital TV switch-over, the Australian public deserve to be satisfied that they are getting value for money and the TV signal that their hard-earned tax dollars are paying for.

To further emphasise some of the concerns, I quote from the comments of the coalition senators in the report of the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee which has just been released:

Uncertainty—terrestrial or satellite?

Coalition Senators are concerned at the lack of certainty for rural and regional households who may not know which methods of digital reception will be available prior to switchover.

This will be of particular concern to residents in the vicinity of the forty four self-help towers identified as likely to be made redundant by the extended footprint of other upgraded towers nearby.

They go on to raise a number of concerns. In their concluding remarks, Senator Fisher and Senator Troeth, who signed off on this, said:

In the absence of sufficient evidence or cost-benefit analysis, Coalition Senators remain concerned that the use of a satellite broadcasting service may not be the most satisfactory or appropriate or cost-efficient means to address the issue of digital television black spots.

We worry about potentially significant out-of-pocket preparatory expenses for rural and regional digital reception, exacerbated by uncertainty about whether they will access digital TV from terrestrial or satellite means.

It finishes by saying:

Coalition Senators consider that television viewers in remote, rural and outer-metropolitan areas deserve equivalent access to equivalent television services as their city counterparts, ideally through upgraded terrestrial services where practicable.

On behalf of many of the people of Pearce who, I said, do not have postal delivery services, who do not have access to mobile phone cover, who are denied access to television services and who also do not have local newspapers delivered, I raise the concern that this situation may not improve in the short term for them.

I support the second reading amendment which have been moved by the member for Casey, particularly that which ‘warns the government that its failures to date risks leaving some Australians without television reception’.

Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My contribution to the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010 will be short. My concern has been the way the government has been handling the digital television space and how wrong some of the decisions have been. If you have a service now and the government is wanting to change from an analog to a digital service, surely the policy should be that there be no cost to the viewer. Why should the viewer who has a service have to bear the cost of changing to a different type of delivery when people in metropolitan cities and in the range of normal terrestrial television towers do not have to pay a single cent? Surely that should be the public policy position.

It is bizarre that the government is proposing a system where people will be left out from a service that they currently have or they will have to pay to get back their service to replace the one that they currently have. That is surely wrong. It is surely a failure of public policy on behalf of the government. These services that are affected are generally in regional or remote Australia. So surely it sends the message that we do not count, that we are second-class citizens and that the government is happy to look after people in the metro areas or the regional areas where there is high-power local television transmitters but that those who are outside that area in the more remote areas or rural areas the government does not care about. That is what is being said.

I give the House a particular instance of another failure of public policy in the digital area, if I may, and that is in relation to high-definition television. High-definition television came to Australia with a huge fanfare. Sets became available and the networks lauded the quality of the pictures that could be produced. There is no doubt with the 1080i that you can produce magnificent pictures. But what has happened since? There is less and less HD content available. Yes, there is some on sport. Even the ABC has dropped its HD channel. Australia is moving against the rest of the world in the delivery of high-definition television.

Very recently I met with the BBC’s head of HDTV at the BBC Television Centre at White City in London. She confirmed to me that HD is moving very fast, even through the recession in England. She confirmed to me that, in general, people watch more television when they have got an HD service; but, more than that, she confirmed to me that standard definition production is becoming obsolete. There is no further call for it. But Australia is going in the other direction: we are producing all these standard definition channels, which is basically code for ‘more crap on television’. Yes, Anthony, you can spell that! I think we all understand that that is the situation.

I call on the minister, Senator Conroy, to have a look at this. Why is he allowing Australian television broadcasters to move away from broadcasting the best quality television that the world can deliver when the rest of the world is demanding that and is receiving it? I ask the minister to look at that as well as this public policy of making people in regional and remote Australia pay for a service that they already have. In the interests of my good friend the member for Grayndler, I will conclude. I thank the House for its time tonight.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank honourable members for their contributions to the debate on the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Digital Television) Bill 2010. Measures in the bill address areas of digital television signal deficiency, or black spots, so that every Australian has access to all free-to-air commercial and national television services. The bill was referred to the Senate Environment Communications and the Arts Legislation Committee, which recommended that the Senate support this bill.

On 11 May 2010, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy announced that the government would provide $375.4 million over 12 years to fund a new satellite service to bring digital television to all Australians who cannot adequately receive terrestrial digital television services. This bill introduces the legislative framework to deliver the new satellite service to eligible viewers in three new commercial television licence areas. Initially, only existing remote commercial television broadcasting licensees will be eligible to apply for the licences. The new satellite service is intended to deliver the same number of digital commercial and national television channels to these areas as is currently available in metropolitan markets. The service will also provide access to local news sourced from regional commercial television broadcasters operating in their satellite licence area.

This bill also amends the Copyright Act 1968 to provide a statutory licensing scheme to ensure relevant broadcasters fulfil their obligations to provide content to the satellite broadcasting service licensees without the potential for copyright infringement. Satellite service licensees will need to comply with the same program standards and captioning requirements that apply to terrestrial commercial television broadcasting licensees. But the bill does take into account the regulatory and technical complexities of broadcasting across time zones. Ensuring the regulation of terrestrial transmission of antisiphoning events also applies to services provided by satellite service licensees.

The bill introduces measures to allow all commercial free-to-air digital television services, including digital multichannels such as GO!, 7TWO and ONE HD, to be provided to Australians no matter where they live. Broadcasting licensees in underserved areas will have the same opportunities as other regional and metropolitan broadcasting licensees to provide a full suite of digital television services in their licence area through provisions to allow commercial broadcasters in regional South Australia, Griffith and Broken Hill to apply for a third digital-only commercial television licence.

Satellite services will ensure all Australians receive the full range of commercial and national television broadcasting services. While most Australians receive their television services from the network broadcasters’ own transmission towers and will continue to do so after the switch-over, it is simply not feasible to use terrestrial coverage to serve all Australians. Some services currently using the Aurora platform raised concerns about the new satellite service for commercial and national television. This bill does not prevent services like NITV or the Rural Health Education Foundation from negotiating access to the new platform, as they did with the Aurora platform.

This bill dramatically improves the choice and quality of digital television services for viewers by establishing a regulatory framework for broadcasters to offer an equivalent range of commercial and national digital television services to their viewers through terrestrial transmission or via satellite. I commend the bill to the House.

Question put:

That the words proposed to be omitted (Mr Anthony Smith’s amendment) stand part of the question.