Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications. I ask the minister to advise the House of the action the government is taking to reduce mobile phone black spots in my electorate of Casey and across Australia, and I further ask that he outline the benefits that will be delivered to outer suburban, rural and regional Australia.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I well remember in 2009, with the honourable member, visiting Steels Creek in the wake of the tragic Black Saturday bushfires and, again, holding a communications forum in Steels Creek in 2013. On each occasion it was obvious, as it is in so many parts of regional, outer suburban and rural Australia, how vital it is that there be mobile phone connectivity for public safety reasons, be it bushfires or floods; for private safety reasons, such as car accidents or farm accidents; and of course to enable people to be connected. In the Howard government we had a proud track record of funding the remediation of mobile phone black spots. In six years of Labor, tens of billions were committed to the National Broadband Network; not one cent was spent on mobile phone black spots.

Thanks to the commitment of $100 million by the Abbott government, and thanks to the extraordinary efforts of my parliamentary secretary, the member for Bradfield, we have been able to announce today that 499 new mobile base stations will be built around Australia. Out of 6,000 black spots that were nominated, 3,000 will be addressed in whole or in part. Three hundred and eighty-five million dollars is mobilised from our funding; from state governments—every state except South Australia contributed; from Telstra and Vodafone; and from local governments.

There has never been as big a telecom bang for the buck as we have seen here, right across Australia. This has been a very, very big result, and I should make this observation: mobile signals are no respecters of electorate boundaries. There are a number of electorates—I think of the member for Hinkler's seat, for example—where there is no base station being funded within that seat, but a large part of the black spot problem is being addressed from connectivity from a base station across the electoral boundary. So the benefits of this go well beyond the electorates that actually have the base stations being built.

But there is more. From 1 July 2016, for two years, there will be another $60 million, so those black spots that missed out on being remediated this time will be back into the mix. We will continue this proud Liberal-Nationals tradition of ensuring that people in regional and rural Australia get equality of treatment in connectivity and, above all, that we address those inequities in telecommunications that Labor so shamefully neglected.