Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit one of the most beautiful parts of my electorate, the iconic Flinders Ranges. The primary reason was to attend a community meeting at Blinman, which was called to discuss the possibilities of installing a mobile phone service in the area. The meeting was attended by John Tonkin from Telstra Countrywide.

The Flinders is growing in popularity as a tourist destination, offering a unique experience, with hundreds of individual attractions clustered in this spectacular and ancient mountain range. While part of the attraction is the remote experience, tourists are a demanding lot and, while some crave the outback experience, others expect to have first-class service in accommodation, catering and packaging. Gone are the days when the majority of tourists came to the area with a trailer and a tent and were prepared to rough it in the ‘outback’. Local operators have driven the shift from a rural pastoral economy to one where tourism is by far the biggest industry.

Supplying a first-class service comes at a significant cost. Apart from a few properties in the south, most electricity is generated locally by diesel, costing many times what urban Australia pays. Water supplies are difficult, predominantly coming from limited underground aquifers. The advent of a bitumen road from Blinman south has made a huge difference to accessing this beautiful region and is helping to drive the industry growth, but the links to the northern Flinders and back to the main highway at Parachilna and Leigh Creek are tough for tourists in standard cars. Phone services are provided by the Telstra radio phone links—state-of-the-art 30 years ago but inadequate in today’s world.

The power of the product, the Flinders Ranges, has enormous potential but progress will always be slowed until these issues are addressed because, for all of the market demand for a unique experience, customers demand that the product be price competitive, and the Flinders tourism operators deal with a very high cost of delivery. The growth in the market has and will continue to come from urban tourists who often have little remote area experience. For many, it comes as a rude shock to find their mobile phones do not work in the area, and there are no emails and no ability to keep an eye on business. An unfortunate by-product of the tourism industry is lost and injured bushwalkers. Mobiles would provide a safety net.

Internet access is limited to satellite. As a user of satellite broadband, I am well aware of its limitations. Local residents using School of the Air to educate their children are continually frustrated by cost, speed and reliability of the service. Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you would be familiar with all these issues.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Absolutely.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Businesses can struggle with what should be the simplest of transactions. A mobile service would address all of these issues. Last Friday, about 20 locals gathered to meet with Telstra to pursue the options. Technical complications abound, backhaul capacity from the nearest access point to the Telstra network is limited to the radio-microwave link from Leigh Creek to Hawker, which is at full capacity—no room for a mobile service! A replacement optic fibre, which surely must happen at some stage, will cost in the vicinity of $3 million. Should this eventuate—to hook Blinman, 30 kilometres to the east, through the ranges to Parachilna—it will require a new radio link. The erection of the station and the link would cost a further $750,000 and the facility would service just the immediate district around Blinman but not the rest of the Flinders. Telstra have said that they would require external funding to that level before they would install. Clearly, this amount of money will not be raised by the local community. It will require support from elsewhere.

The community is not deterred. Nothing ever gets fixed by doing nothing, so they are forming a lobby group with representation drawn from all groups of influence in the area to push for a solution for the region. Unfortunately, the Labor government have no plan for telecommunications in regional Australia, apart from the fall-back position in their economically flawed National Broadband Network proposals, where communities like Blinman, with fewer than 1,000 people, receive the default satellite option—the same inadequate service they have now.

If rural and regional Australia is to pay 10 per cent of the cost of the $43 billion broadband experiment, it is fair to think that there should be investment in addressing their issues. The government’s National Broadband Network plan is status quo only and simply not good enough. Having robbed the telecommunications fund set aside to meet just this type of circumstance, the government deny regional Australia any chance of a fair deal. Good governments govern for all Australians, not just those who support them. I will assist this group in any way that I can to help address the regional imbalance.