Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thought I would rise to speak on this legislation to highlight what is missing from it and areas that I believe that this government is not acting on. We have heard that this legislation is largely noncontroversial for people here in this House, but I rise to speak about my disappointment about what is not in these bills—the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation) Bill 2014 and the Telecommunications (Industry Levy) Amendment Bill 2014. What is not in this legislation is a commitment from this government to continue Labor's plan to rollout the NBN. A quick look at the NBN rollout map says it all. Around Victoria there is good news for some areas, but very bad news for my own area and the Bendigo electorate. Splotches of purple and brown lights are spreading out in areas like Ballarat. I congratulate Ballarat and I congratulate Shepparton: two areas which are getting the rollout of the National Broadband Network, the fibre cable connecting homes and businesses to the internet. Bendigo, however, misses out. Not only has Bendigo continued to miss out but, since the election of this government, they have been knocked off the map.

On election day, areas of Heathcote, Bendigo, Kyneton, Castlemaine and Maldon were on the map. They were listed for rollout. They were going to get the connection speeds that our metro cities enjoy. But, since the election of this government, they have just disappeared, and the people in that electorate keep asking me, and rightly so: what is the plan?

A year after the election we still do not have a plan for large parts of regional Victoria and large parts of my electorate. We do not know when we are going to get the NBN rollout and we also do not know what we are going to get. All this is from a government that before the election promised that people in the Bendigo region, as well as other areas of regional Victoria, would not only get broadband sooner and quicker but they would get it cheaper. A year on we still do not have a plan. How are they going to meet this election commitment that the people in regional Victoria, the people in Bendigo, will get it sooner, quicker and cheaper if we do not yet have a plan and we do not know what we are going to get?

This is a big problem for our region. So much of our life is spent online now, yet people cannot get the basics. Weekly I am inundated with calls from small businesses, from homes—people ringing, frustrated, that when they call to find out what internet is available in their area some are told as little as there is no internet service in their area—none whatsoever. Some are told the ADSL ports are full right now and there is no plan to introduce any more—keep ringing and hopefully someone will no longer require their service and you can take their spot. It is a particular concern in Castlemaine. In Castlemaine a retailer will ring and say, 'Great news, you are in an area which has ADSL.' The frustrated local then says, 'Okay, I have heard that before, fine, I will sign up with you.' Then the retailer goes to Telstra and Telstra says, 'Yes, while there is coverage of ADSL in Castlemaine there are currently no ports of available.' So the retailer has to go back to the frustrated local and say, 'Look, I am really sorry, there are no ports available—there is no waiting list for a port to be available; you will have to survive on what you've got, which is either mobile phone coverage or dial-up.' This is the real problem we face in the bush day in, day out. The frustrating thing is that there was a plan and the plan was ripped up. Even more frustrating is that all we are seeing from this government is more and more tidying up of the papers. This bill is an example of that. It may cross the i's and dot the t's, it may increase the industry levy slightly, but it is not genuine reform. It is not bringing about the internet and infrastructure that people in the regions need when they need to connect.

Recently I met here in Parliament House an action group, iLoddon Mallee. They used to be known as iBendigo and, before that, NBN for Bendigo. They have constantly been seeking a meeting with the minister about communications. They have written to me to ask whether I can help organise a meeting with the minister. Given that I struggle to meet with the minister in my capacity as the federal member for Bendigo, I thought I would read out their letter and put on the record what the iLoddon Mallee advocacy group are asking for. They say:

I write to you in my capacity as the chair of the iLoddon Mallee on behalf of Bendigo and Loddon-Mallee communities in Victoria.

iLoddon Mallee Project Manager Marg O'Rourke and I will be in Canberra again in November. Pending a scheduled meeting with the Minister of Communications we have written to him seeking a meeting to discuss the state of the NBN rollout to the iLoddon Mallee region.

We managed to meet with Paul Fletcher in our last meeting in June. However, we felt that it is imperative that we have an opportunity to speak with the minister directly to update him on our region's preparedness.

This is an organisation that represents business communities; this is an organisation that represents local government. All they want to do is meet with the Minister for Communications to find out 'when?' They want an answer to the question I proposed at the beginning of my contribution in this debate—they want to know when the NBN will be rolled out to our region. There was a plan, the plan was ripped up and to this day we have no plan. These are the kinds of things that this government should be doing in government. These are the kinds of things that should be in this bill that is before us. Where is the plan for the NBN for regional Victoria? Where is the plan for my electorate?

Some of the good news we have had in relation to telecommunications is that the NBN towers have gone up and people that have access to these towers are connecting. Small communities like Malmsbury are for the first time ever having decent download speeds, and they are embracing it and they are loving it. The problem that we have is that some of the people that they wish to do business with or communicate with are just up the road—businesses in Kyneton or in Bendigo—but they are struggling to connect to those businesses because of the telecommunications problems and the internet speeds in our regions. I do not believe that city MPs really understand this. We simply do not have the infrastructure that we need in the regions to connect like the rest of Australia can. It is not just a problem in regional Victoria—it is a problem throughout the whole of Australia. There is now a digital divide in this country between city and metro. Communications infrastructure is just as important as roads or water. We need to make sure that we have a system that is able to connect everybody.

Another complaint that I get quite frequently concerns the push by all government services to go online—they ask that you do your paperwork online because it will save time and it will be quicker and easier to work your way through the bureaucracy. It sounds great, but if you do not have a decent internet connection it might drop out just before you hit the send button. It does not work if you do not have a decent internet connection that drops in and drops out. A recent example that was raised with me where this has become a particular problem is within our farming community, when rural financial counselling services have been going to farms to assist farmers apply for support loans. The problem is that when they get there they do not have the mobile phone coverage to be able to connect to the internet to help that farmer apply for the concessional loans. So much of our life is online and yet in parts of Victoria, in parts of regional Australia, we just do not have the infrastructure that we need to be able to connect with everyone else. That is a major problem that I see with this government—they have no plan. There was a plan but they tore it up and we still do not have a plan. What we have is bills like this that, as I said, tinker around the edges, do a bit of a paperwork, cross the t's and dot the i's but fail to demonstrate genuine reform which would bridge the digital gap between city and country.

I really hope that the minister actually picks up the letter and meets with iLoddon Mallee. They are, as I have said, a group of businesses. They include Bendigo Health, the City of Greater Bendigo, Macedon Ranges, Mount Alexander, the Bendigo Business Council and major manufacturers in our electorate. We have one manufacturer, Keech Australia, who actually design—they have a 3-D printer—and custom make equipment and designs for overseas mining. But yet they cannot have a live-time conversation with their clients. They cannot send their model or interact with their clients overseas via the internet, because the speeds are so slow in East Bendigo. They simply do not have the infrastructure that they need to be able to connect to do business.

If they were in Melbourne, not a problem. If they were in Ballarat, not a problem. If they were in Shepparton or any other area where the NBN was being rolled out before this government got elected and tore up the plan, they would not have this problem. But because they are in Bendigo and we do not have the NBN yet, we do not have that fibre in the ground connecting businesses to the NBN network, they are being disadvantaged. What they have to do is download the plans onto a disk, onto a CD-ROM, send it to the clients—and hope that Australia Post can get it there on time—and then ask them to connect and pull the program up, and then they have a phone conversation. Seriously! This is part of the digital divide that I am talking about. This is why this government is really hurting regional communities and slowing down their ability to connect.

We are constantly trying to encourage universities to go online to go to a hybrid model of in-the-classroom and online study. We say that that is what students want. It is one of the big pushes behind the reforms that the La Trobe University is pushing for. But the problem is that we do not have the infrastructure in the bush for their students to be able to connect to their classes, to their tutorials, and to engage in that online programming, because we simply do not have the infrastructure. It is just like country roads. It is like driving down the freeway and turning off onto a dirt road—if you do not have the proper internet connections, if you do not have the fibre going throughout the whole region, you have to slow down before you turn off and you get onto that bumpy road.

It is quite simple and people in the electorate of Bendigo get it, and that is why it is one of the biggest issues that is raised with me. It does not matter where they are from or who they are. They could be young people that are just moving into Bendigo to go to university. They could be older people wanting to develop their skills or go back to training, or even looking to socially connect with their grandchildren. They could be businesses. They could be any number of people that contact me. When it comes to the NBN itself, because of the delays that we have, we have some areas in the greenfields areas of Bendigo that are still waiting to be connected. They have their new home—they are new housing estates—and they are still waiting for NBN to turn up and roll it out. Even on this minister's watch, when he likes to rant about the problems of the previous government, he has his own problems of ensuring that, in the NBN areas that have been listed, the NBN is being rolled out on time.

What disappoints me the most about this bill, the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation) Bill, is the fact that it fails to actually have a plan to continue the rollout of the NBN. So much of our lives is online, and right now people in the bush are missing out. Things are slow when it comes to the NBN. Things are holding us back. We have the innovation and we have the ability to connect to sell our products online. We have an amazing network of producers in our region. We have an amazing network of farmers that are innovating, that are wanting to use the internet as a way to follow their livestock, yet they are being held back by really slow, inferior internet connections.

What disappoints them the most is that, with the previous Labor government, there was a plan. There was a plan for rollout in our region. We were on the map. The coalition got elected and they tore up the plan, and to this day we still do not know when we will get the NBN, what kind of service it will be, and what it is going to cost. All we have seen from this minister, apart from bills like this that really do nothing, is a failure to meet with the advocacy groups who just want to work with the minister to find out when and how they can assist the earlier rollout in the Bendigo electorate.

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