Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It does, I am sure, come as a great surprise to know that rural and regional Australians do run businesses, and we are just as entitled to have communications services as those who are in the city. We have broadband issues, we have landline connection issues, we have mobile phone coverage issues already, and a lot of money has been spent trying to resolve them. And that money, in that fund, was designed to continue to try and treat those issues to provide an adequate—not a great but an adequate—service for rural and regional Australians.

Last week my office was notified of a local business in Wagga Wagga—and an article appeared in Wagga Wagga’s Daily Advertiser on Monday about it—which had been waiting for two months for their business telephone, internet and merchant lines to be connected after their business relocated. They had their phone lines diverted through to a mobile, but then they were incurring additional charges and the redirected line was disconnected days before the new lines were connected. This business was losing up to $40,000 a day—and they make their money between December and June because they are an agriculture based company. I suppose that is testament to the fact that anything in agriculture is simply, obviously, to many people not worth investing in—and that is a crying shame. The original work order said the work was supposed to have happened on 17 December but that paperwork was lost.

In the Area News on 28 February 2008, there was a story about a local welder in Griffith who had cut off his business landline and gone solely with a Next G phone. Despite being able to see the base tower, high on the hill, from his workshop, the businessman claims his phone has appalling reception, when it has reception at all. He is missing calls and voice messages. The whole process for him to conduct his business is rather difficult. There have been more than a dozen complaint calls and his phones have been sent away to technicians twice. He has been forced to take measures to try and ensure that he can get any calls at all. The mere fact of outlining in this House the issues that we are confronting currently is just a demonstration of why we desperately need the Communications Fund in situ, in place. No party should be able to come along and rob rural and regional people of the only opportunity they have to fix these problems.

A business in Leeton came to me in January because the only replacement Next G phone suitable for them was not going to be made available until May this year. This is a family based business and they have only ever dealt with Telstra. However, they purchased an LG CDMA phone and car kits for the directors’ vehicles and prime movers. These were costly and still work without any problem. There are 16 in total. All the phones are preset only to business numbers and triple 0, which has meant another charge for the company. They used a Wagga Wagga based company for the service, who informed the business that there is not a suitable phone on the market for them. Leeton is not exactly at the end of the earth. Leeton is a vibrant community of around 11,000 people, hosting vibrant industries, and yet, right in the heart of it, there are these problems.

The recommendation for that company, while they are waiting for a suitable phone to come on the market, was that they should purchase the prepaid phones and new SIM cards—and they are about $150 for the cheapest ones, which means a total of $2,500 for this business—and then, when the new ones come on the market, they should throw the old ones away and switch to the others that may be better designed for them to use permanently. I do not think this is an adequate response. As I said, this is not the end of the earth; this is a vibrant community of around 11,000 people, with significant industry and industry development. Thankfully, there is new industry just coming into Leeton which will provide employment opportunities, but we cannot even get valuable communications processes going for these people.

I have written to Minister Conroy and urged him to consider the concerns of many of the constituents throughout my electorate of Riverina who have made contact with my office, extremely frustrated about the coverage that they have in many of these areas. There are costs associated with the changeover. I have had complaints about people having to send new phones back, about Telstra reprogramming software and replacing handsets, exchanging handsets and trialling devices just in an attempt to replicate the CDMA service which has worked in the past. How are we going to afford to do this in the future, when the Communications Fund is no longer available to us? The fund that the Labor government is raiding here today was designed to try to overcome exactly the problems that I am outlining in the House today. This is just a snapshot. I have pages of problems here that I will have no chance of getting through this evening. But this is what this fund was designed to do: to give us some equity as Australian citizens.

It is extremely important for our mobile phone users to have coverage where there has previously been a CDMA service. I have been pleading with the new minister to understand that, despite assurances on a daily basis from Telstra that the Next G network is delivering the same services as CDMA, the reality is that there are still so many problems with the hardware being reported to my office. I do not actually doubt the network. I think the network may be out there if you can actually access some hardware that can connect to it. That is the minister’s problem as well: you cannot just have a network and not provide the tools to access the network. It is simply not delivering on the promises. Thankfully, the minister has done the right thing. I thank him and applaud him for that. He has evoked the licence condition that the former minister applied—that being that if the Next G network coverage was not equivalent to that of the CDMA network then the licence condition would be enforced so that Telstra could not shut down the CDMA network until such time as that had taken place. Minister Conroy has done that, to his credit. I say thank you, on behalf of the people of the Riverina, for not allowing Telstra to shut down the CDMA network when it is obvious that there are still many issues to resolve.

More than 110 residents and businesspeople within the small district of Mangoplah attended a community meeting on 9 January 2008 to voice their concerns about the CDMA closure. Remember that Telstra were to close down the CDMA network in January. And here we had 110 residents turning up to a public meeting in a small community saying that they had once had CDMA and they were not getting the equivalent coverage under Next G. They wanted an understanding of what they could do to get improved Next G coverage. You know what? The Telstra Country Wide area manager, Mr Cottrill, answered several questions and spoke to individuals but then basically said, ‘You know, we need money to put up a base station so that you can get equivalent coverage to what you had with CDMA.’ That is what this fund is for. It is to provide money—and it should be used to provide money—to put up such base stations. Mr Cottrill, who does a very good job, by the way, also agreed that in the circumstances it would be better that a base station be built in Mangoplah. That is on the priority list; however, there will be no signs of a base station in that area for at least 12 months. I wonder what is going to happen now, given that he thought that he had a fund somewhere to draw from in order to get his base station. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Albanese) adjourned.

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