Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to make this contribution tonight on the appropriation bills, I endorse the comments made very eloquently by the member for Scullin on climate change. Like him, I believe that climate change is an issue that deeply disturbs my community and my electorate. People are very unhappy—that is how I would characterise their attitude—in the sense that they have been told, for example, that everything is going to be okay with respect to the climate. What they have witnessed in reality is substantial change in climate and substantial threat to their future economic prosperity, their economic security and their very living security.

That is a responsibility that government should take. The government’s responsibility is to alert its people in times of crisis or potential crisis and to work collaboratively and collectively towards solutions. But what we have had in the midst of the 11 years of this government is 11 years of denial about a problem that threatens the very economic security and economic prosperity of our country. That deeply disturbs me. So I certainly endorse the member for Scullin’s comments on climate change, because it is an issue that my community is demanding that our government, of whatever persuasion, takes action on.

In speaking on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2006-2007 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2006-2007 tonight, I would also like to raise a couple of issues that concern my constituents. One in particular is the communication services that exist in the suburb of Cranbourne. I have been here in this Main Committee on several occasions and in the other place speaking about Cranbourne, which is a fantastic area and a suburb in my electorate of Holt. The very interesting thing about the suburb of Cranbourne is that in the past it was categorised as a rural township and it was known for that but, due to the very rapid expansion and growth of Melbourne, numerous families have shifted into the area and have changed the face of Cranbourne. So Cranbourne is now a very active, vibrant suburb of Melbourne, about 42 kilometres south-east of Melbourne.

In this suburb, which is inundated now with housing—in fact, the population growth of Cranbourne is astonishing—when someone picks up the phone to make a phone call, they have to pay an STD rate and that is ridiculous. The people of Cranbourne, who have lobbied this government for 11 years now for this particular issue to change, are very unhappy. Why is it, for example, that in the suburb adjacent or very close to Cranbourne, Berwick, a person does not have to pay an STD rate when they pick up the phone? When the residents of Frankston pick up the phone, they do not have to pay that particular STD rate.

So the question that I ask again on behalf of the residents of Cranbourne is this: in this rapidly growing suburban area, why do they have to continue to pay this STD rate? Really, it is a disgrace, because it is an injustice. The people of Cranbourne have asked their government to take their concerns into account for 11 years and they have not been taken into account. Because they are a suburban area, and that is acknowledged, they should not have to pay this STD rate. They have been told that everything is going to be okay. In fact, a local member of parliament who represents that region, or close to it, effectively said that this issue was going to be dealt with—it was going to be solved. There was going to be a government inquiry into it. The government was going to make submissions to Telstra and, on a great happy day 12 months subsequent to this particular announcement, the residents of Cranbourne, when they picked up the telephone, would not have to pay an STD rate.

Eighteen months have passed and Telstra has been sold, and there is no hope for the residents of Cranbourne. They have been deceived and they have been dudded by that member of parliament who made that promise in the local papers. He will be held to account for making that promise—you mark my words on that—because he has deceived the people of Cranbourne and they do not deserve to be deceived. The people of Cranbourne, for example, until very recently did not have a Medicare office—a Medicare office needed to serve a population base of some 30,000 people. Again, for 10 years before they got this office, they were lobbying the government, ‘We need a Medicare office.’ They deserved a Medicare office. They were located within the city of Casey and, until the Medicare office was opened in the city of Casey in 2004, when it had a population of 190,000, that city did not have a Medicare office and yet the city of Monash, which had a population of 165,000, had three Medicare offices.

The people of Cranbourne, like many of the residents of the city of Casey, pay taxes. The people of Cranbourne are good, hardworking, loyal Australians. They pay their taxes. They believe that a government should actually deliver a service which they are entrusted to provide—the provision of a Medicare office—but what has happened? It has taken them 10 years to actually get a Medicare office. That Medicare office was opened by the then minister, Joe Hockey.

What is interesting about this particular Medicare office? Unlike other Medicare offices in Fountain Gate, Dandenong and Frankston, which are all open until 7 pm on Thursday nights and between 9 am and 12.30 pm on Saturday mornings, the Medicare office in Cranbourne is the only nine to five, Monday to Friday office. There are an additional 5½ hours of access at the other offices compared to the hours of access at Cranbourne. Why are working families in Cranbourne being denied access to these services when just down the road in the Fountain Gate Shopping Centre people get those services? A lot of people work shiftwork and a lot of people have families.

In my electorate of Holt, I have the highest rate of mortgagees in the country. In my electorate, I have the highest rate of couples with dependent children in the country. These people work. They send their children to school. They take them to sporting events. They are not just the typical family working nine to five which this government seems to have in mind. These people are those who delivered economic prosperity to our country. They pay their taxes. Why aren’t the people of Cranbourne—hardworking people who have delivered this prosperity—being given access to a Medicare office operating during what I would categorise as reasonable hours? The Cranbourne shopping centre is a very busy shopping centre. People want to take their forms to that particular shopping centre, particularly on a Thursday night or a Saturday morning because some of them cannot get there. In fact, I have spoken to people who tell me, ‘We’ve been working and we just basically can’t get there.’ The fact that it has not been opened outside of the normal nine to five hours, I think, is a disgrace. Again, if you are a resident of the city of Cranbourne, you would feel quite rightly that you were being discriminated against.

The other issue I would like to raise which really irks a great number of my constituents is the issue of broadband in the outer suburban areas of Melbourne, particularly in my area. We have a lot of families shift into this area and a lot of them would like to run businesses from home. They want fast internet access. I can give you an example of a constituent who asked that the issue be raised of broadband not being rolled out by Telstra. He lives in Lyndhurst. He has asked that I not name him, but we will call him Mr L. He has asked me to talk about his story. He applied for ADSL with Telstra in December 2006. On approximately 5 January, he was informed by Telstra that they would not be able to connect a BigPond broadband ADSL for him because apparently there were no ports free for connection and ‘Telstra has no plans to add further capacity’. So he is left waiting for someone to part the earth or the very unlikely event of someone giving up their broadband connection for dial-up. This is in Lyndhurst. Incidentally, this person has been working in the IT industry for the past 18 years and wanted to set up a business from home. Great incentive to live in Lyndhurst!

Another gentleman, a resident of Hampton Park, which is not that far away from Lyndhurst—he also has asked that I not use his name, but we will call him Mr F—has been endeavouring for the past 18 months to get ADSL broadband connected. He has neighbours who have a broadband connection. However, after he made a complaint to Telstra he was advised that, because he was located 5.15 kilometres from the exchange at Lynbrook, he was too far from the exchange. Just remember that—5.15 kilometres. If you are 4.5 kilometres away—600 metres away—you can get a connection, but if you are 5.15 kilometres away from this exchange you cannot. Consequently, he gets nothing.

To show how the issue of broadband really affects the economic productivity of our country and how it can affect people in my area, I want to talk in particular about a gentleman called Walter Meyler. He manages a company called Pressotechnik Pty Ltd, which is based in a factory in Rimfire Drive, Hallam. This company is a high-technology engineering company involved in metal pressing and metal joining. They sell in Australia and they build special-purpose machinery for industry. High tech—this is the next wave of Australian industry coming through, the next wave of Australian manufacturing. This particular company is a daughter company of a firm in Germany. It employs five people, so it is a small business.

Around August last year this gentleman shifted his company into Hallam. He applied to get an ADSL2 broadband connection. They needed the ADSL2 to communicate more efficiently with the parent company in Germany. This, the next wave of manufacturing reform and development, is the thing that you would expect governments would be trying to encourage in this country. We keep hearing about niche manufacturing; as old manufacturing is moving offshore, we have niche manufacturing. Here is our niche manufacturer.

Mr Meyler wanted the ADSL2 because he needed quick internet access to the intranet site in Germany. He wanted to employ a design engineer. This person needed to download and send large engineering design files to counterparts in Germany, China and the United States and to their technical sales reps in New South Wales who needed to do reporting and access technical documentation via a customer relationship management package, which requires this particular technology to allow efficient access. When the company went to Telstra—because they expected that this would not be too much of a problem—they were advised that they needed a dedicated line from the Princes Highway, which runs close to Rimfire Drive, through a fibre optic cable. This would cost the company between $2,500 and $3,000 per month.

Other internet service providers said that the Hallam subexchange did not have the capacity and, therefore, they could not provide the ADSL2. Because the company’s access to the international intranet site is so slow, they have to get the parent company in Germany to post CDs with things like sales presentations on them. The area they are located in is industrial, with many small businesses and factories who would want to use this capacity in the future, if not now. Effectively, they cannot because of Telstra and because the government is not spending the money to roll out this broadband access which is needed.

When speaking to Walter about this issue—think about his company and what he does—he was very upset because he knows that in a country like Taiwan, which is looked at as an economic powerhouse in the region, the download speed is 50 megabits per second. What is his download speed? It is 0.5 megabits per second on his current ADSL. So how does he feel? We have to compete against companies in Taiwan. This company, from what I understand, is the sort of high-tech next generation manufacturing company that we need to attract into our area. We have a lot of young people coming through who need these sorts of jobs, and this company is seriously thinking of relocating as a consequence of this problem. So if you are a business and you want to shift into the Casey area or into Hallam, why would you do that?

What grossly offends me about this is that the department of communications confirmed in estimates on 12 February that the Howard government’s metropolitan broadband black spots program had spent six times as much on bureaucrats as on the roll-out of the broadband. More than two years after the $50 million program was announced by the Prime Minister during the 2004 election, government bungling has resulted in $1.3 million being spent on administration costs while only $200,000 has been spent on providing broadband services. People like Walter are not happy when they hear these sorts of facts. They want action. They deserve a government that delivers the services they pay their taxes for.

I would also like to talk about an issue of pressing importance in my electorate, and that is the Commonwealth Financial Counselling Program. You may recall that I mentioned that in my electorate I have the highest rate of mortgagees in this country. I have a lot of families. There are a lot of financial pressures in my electorate, and they were exacerbated when the price of petrol went to $1.40 and when there were interest rate rises. These people are very heavily leveraged and could do with some support. The Commonwealth Financial Counselling Program is administered by the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. The Financial Counselling Program funds incorporated non-profit community based organisations and local government community service organisations to provide access to financial counselling services free of charge to individuals, families and small business operators who are experiencing personal financial difficulty due to circumstances such as unemployment, sickness, credit overcommitment—and that is an issue in my electorate—and family breakdown, which unfortunately is also a substantial issue in my electorate.

A range of services can be provided by a financial counsellor, as people here would know. They can assist with negotiations with creditors, advocate on a person’s behalf, assist people to take the appropriate course of action in debt recovery and, importantly, assist people to develop a budgeting plan so they can take control of their finances and avoid other consequences. The Commonwealth financial counselling service that can be accessed by people in my electorate is the Casey Cardinia Community Legal Service. This service has such a high level of demand that it usually fills three weeks worth of appointments within two days and unfortunately once the waiting time has been reached—three weeks—it has to stop taking appointments. In fact, in the face of massive demand, the service is given so few resources by the federal government that it can only afford two part-time financial counsellors, which does not even amount to a counsellor being available all week. It provides two part-time financial counsellors to provide assistance to the more than 96,688 people in my electorate. Why is this the case? If the federal government are going to spend a very large amount of money—as I understand they did—advertising to the electorate about why they should be financially responsible, why is it that they cannot spend the money to provide more financial counselling services on the ground for the large number of people in my electorate who need that service and would grasp at it very quickly if it was available?

In closing tonight, I would briefly like to talk about the Holt Australia Day awards, which I initiated and presented at Betula Reserve in Doveton on Australia Day—a very good day to present these awards. The purpose of the awards was to recognise the spirit and the commitment of local volunteers who through their service strengthen our community and our country. And they do. They are the glue that binds our community together. When we called for nominations we had a phenomenal response from a huge variety of community organisations. We had a selection committee. They had a very difficult task in choosing them.

The Holt Australia Day awards recognised a number of people and tragically I think my time is going to run out to mention them. I wanted to mention the invaluable efforts of the local CFA staff and volunteers who, in addition to the large volume of call-outs that they have received for local fires and assistance, were travelling as part of the CFA strike teams to the recent bushfires burning around the state. We honoured the five CFAs in my electorate. There had not been a formalised ceremony by the community to acknowledge their efforts and, given the number of hours that they put in and the lives and the properties that they literally saved, it was appropriate that we gave them an award. It went down very well.

I may run out of time, but I am going to mention some of the other people who deserve to be mentioned because they are very rarely recognised. They are Vitolio Aia, Susan Bergman, Anne Brown, Gary Brown, Margaret Fairhurst, Terri Fallows, Jenni Hunter, Judy Martin, Shirlene Dawn Nadarajah, Glenda Novotny, Connie Newman, Derbus and Rachela Pequeno, Ed Price, Ken Ritter, George Stephens, Venice Taweel, James Ter, Neil and Tammey Tiley, the Berwick Opportunity Shop and the Cranbourne, Hallam, Hampton Park, Narre Warren and Narre Warren North Fire Brigades. I thank all of the individuals mentioned for their incredible service and their devotion to their community. What strikes me about those people was that many had to be nominated by other people because they would not put themselves forward for an award. They are the unsung heroes. They are the people who make our community tick over. It was a huge honour for me to, in front of 500 people in Doveton at Betula Reserve, present the awards to them and to give those people—those silent heroes who make our country run—at least some recognition to let them know that they are appreciated and valued by our community.

Debate (on motion by Mr Melham) adjourned.

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