Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Access to reliable mobile services is not a nice-to-have; it is a necessity. Residents expect that when they move into a suburb they're going to have electricity, roads and schools, and they also expect they'll have access to communications services, including mobile phone coverage. This time last year, some households and businesses in the Ponds, a suburb in my electorate of Greenway, struggled to access even a single bar of mobile reception. The mobile carriers confirmed that this suburb had some of the worst quality metropolitan mobile coverage in Greater Sydney.

Small businesses in the area and residents who work from home were suffering. A local from the Ponds, David, who runs a management consultancy, said he struggled to make a successful work call from inside his own house. David told the Daily Telegraph:

I get one bar of 3G in one corner of my office upstairs in the southern side of my house and I can't move the phone …

And IT consultant Abhinav said:

… there's so many people and the towers have limited capacity.

And yet the New South Wales Liberal government refused to act, so Greenway did. I made representations to the New South Wales government and initiated a petition that gathered over 1,000 signatures from the Greenway community in support of a new mobile tower in the Ponds. After months and months of tireless community campaigning, our pressure achieved an important victory in March last year. The New South Wales Liberals finally backtracked and approved a new mobile tower for the good people of the Ponds. And that's why, just a couple of weeks ago, it was especially pleasing to visit a local park in the Ponds, Jonas Bradley reserve, where contractors were commencing works to finally build this much needed tower. This outcome is the culmination of advocacy from our community and shows what we can achieve when we work together.

I thank the residents of the Ponds for their patience and their ongoing involvement to get this crucial piece of infrastructure built. I won stop fighting for this tower until it's up and running in the Ponds and our residents and small businesses have the mobile coverage they need and deserve.