Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about something that is very dear to those of us who live in the country and to let the Senate know that we had some quite good news this morning on the NBN rollout in South Australia. We heard that we will see the commencement of the build in two towns very close to where I live in the Riverland of South Australia, Glossop and Loxton. I refer to the change in status of Loxton and Glossop. Where previously they had been put in the 'build commenced' maps, they actually really are on the 'build commenced' maps now, since 'build commenced', in my understanding of the phrase, actually means that there is somebody out on the ground doing something—that they have started construction, and have not merely drawn a line on a piece of paper.

For a community like the community that I live in, in the Riverland of South Australia, the ability to access faster broadband services is extraordinarily important. I think that many people in the city probably take for granted the level of access that they have to various services because they have such a plethora of providers from which they can get access to reasonably fast broadband services; it is just a matter of how much they are prepared to pay for the amount of data that they wish to upload or download. But in areas like the one where I live, that is not available to them. So the announcement this morning from the NBN that they were actually going to commence the build in both Glossop and Loxton by building two wireless towers is fantastic news. It will certainly give a huge amount of confidence to other towns within our community that the NBN is on its way.

Just to give you an example of how terribly important this is for my community, I have people who live probably within 20 kilometres of my house—and I live in the township of Renmark—who do not have any broadband services whatsoever. They cannot actually use their mobile phones unless they drive up to the top of the hill so that they can get access. For them, this is an extraordinary development, and it will probably give them heart that access to broadband and other services that those in cities and more developed areas take for granted may be coming to some of our rural and regional areas.

This is not just important for the fact that people and families like the idea that the kids can download movies and watch them or they can have several pieces of high-speed digital technology, with dad working on his computer and mum watching a movie and the kids playing their games. It actually has massive economic benefit for rural and regional Australia. If we look at our farming sector, their ability to be competitive in the international marketplace can be significantly enhanced by their ability to access this sort of service. Most of the Riverland is under horticulture, which means that they rely on irrigation. To be able to plan your irrigation without having to be in the field and actually manually turning on your pump because you are able to do it through digital access means that you do not have to be there. There are lots of other programs and lots of other opportunities that the digital world offers to our farmers to allow them to become more efficient in this place. Most particularly, it allows our farmers a level of equity and people living in regional areas a level of equity that they currently do not have. So it was really great news to be able to open up the NBN website this morning and see that these two towns were going to get towers built in the area which would allow the people of both Glossop and Loxton to get high-speed digital transmission. But that is just the start of it and certainly the morale boost for other people in the region was probably quite significant.

The other thing that I think this has demonstrated is that the coalition said in their policy in relation to the rollout of the NBN that it is really important that the rollout focused on areas and places that are underserviced at the moment. This is representative of delivering on that policy. There are a lot of areas in South Australia, as you would well know, Mr Acting Deputy President Fawcett, as a South Australian senator yourself and someone that has represented a regional electorate, that we seem to be forgotten in rural areas because we do not have the population mass so therefore people are not screaming, the demand is not there. That does not mean that those people are not equally as important and deserving of the same sort of service, particularly when you consider that the majority of the economic development and economic activity that occurs in Australia occurs in two primary sectors, agriculture and mining, and both of those sectors occur in rural and regional Australia.

We also understand that in the development of this technological space it is probably unrealistic, despite the fact that everyone would like to think everyone would get the same thing, for us to be delivering fibre to the premises to every household across the whole of Australia. One of the really good things that has come out of the last few months is the ability for us to have had the opportunity to look at a mix of technologies that allow us to efficiently roll out an NBN service that means that once it is rolled out it will eventually not just be the best service that is available but we have to countenance that best service in putting it into the context that it has to be affordable in terms of how much it costs to deliver it. If we cannot deliver the service within an affordable envelope then the people who are receiving it will not be able to afford to pay for it in the longer term. People want a reliable service.

We have heard a lot about everybody wanting fibre to the premise and I am sure that if we could afford to deliver it to everybody then it would probably be quite a satisfactory outcome. But if you go down the street and speak to people, as I have in my community and across the whole of South Australia, and ask them what they want from their NBN, they ask for a reasonably fast service, a reasonably reliable service but also an affordable service. Nowhere in any conversation that I have heard when talking to the man on the street have they ever had the discussion with me and said, 'I want fibre to the premise,' because I think the majority of Australians do not understand what fibre to the premise actually is. They want the outcome, they do not care how it is delivered. They do not care about the technology, they just care about what they can have at the end of the day. I am delighted that we are seeing the rollout of two wireless towers. The Riverland areas we are talking about servicing in Loxton and in Glossop are not very highly populated areas, they are quite sparsely populated, and I am sure that the people in these communities do not want a digger going down the street and digging up the entire street to put in fibre when they possibly are going to get a more than adequate service through these wireless points.

I was delighted today as a member of this community to see the commencement of the NBN build in my region and the people I have spoken to are also delighted that we have actually started to see the build commenced in our region. We are looking forward to being able to have access to the NBN in rural and regional South Australia, as I am sure every other rural and regional area in Australia is going to be, because I believe that we will be getting it a lot sooner and a lot cheaper than we would have got it had we continued on with the gold-plated version that we had been promised in the past. On behalf of the people of the Riverland, I say it is a fantastic day today when we start to see the rollout of the NBN in the Riverland.

Senate adjourned at 22.29