Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) | Hansard source

I want to commend the member for Indi for her contribution. The member for Indi is correct. There is a common theme coming through from the speakers on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards and Other Measures) Bill 2023, and that is regional and rural Australia. I'll add another element to that—the peri-urban regions as well. The members for Riverina and Indi have both paid compliments to the Minister for Communications, and I want to do that as well. Communications is such an important issue that should be bipartisan, and it's a credit to her that she is here today to listen.

I'll talk a little bit about what's happening in my community today. I've been inundated with calls and messages. I know it will mean a lot to them that the minister is here to listen, because it is such an important issue, particularly in emergencies. I will give the minister and her team fair warning that there is some correspondence coming following up our correspondence earlier this year looking at eligibility around the Dandenong Ranges. I know and appreciate the minister acknowledged the concerns about resilience in peri-urban areas and having to look at the boundaries of the funding schemes and how we can resolve these. We will be looking forward to working with the minister's office on how we can find funding for peri-urban areas. It's a continual frustration for my community in the Dandenong Ranges, the Upper Yarra and the Yarra Valley. It's a 40- to 50-minute drive with no traffic from the CBD, but anyone who visits knows it's not suburban. It is beautiful nature. It's farmland, agricultural land, mountains and challenging terrain. There are a lot of beautiful trees. There are a lot of tall trees, hundreds of feet high. The problem is that, when there's a storm, lots of trees fall down and we lose power. When we lose power in our community, we lose communications.

There are about 70,000 properties that are without power today across my community, including many community groups and many schools, including my own children's school. I want to pay tribute quickly to all those teachers that I know are teaching and doing the best they can today without any power at the schools. I say thank you to them and all the community members who are rallying around to make sure we can get through. Hopefully it will be only a couple of days or the next week or so without power and communications.

I also need to acknowledge that for many people today is actually going to be a tough day. It's going to bring back some trauma from the June storms of 2021. Anyone that lived in my area and community then was impacted by those storms. We were three weeks without power ourselves, but that was nothing. Many people in the Dandenong were three months without power and, 2½ years on, they haven't rebuilt yet. So I want to acknowledge that for those people, who might be okay physically and whose house might be okay, there will be a lot of trauma. It's important we rally around and support each other.

I want to share a couple of stories of my experience on that day but also from the CFA with the minister in the room so she can understand my passion and my community's passion about why we need strong, resilient emergency services. On that day, my wife and I were blocked in our house for about six to eight hours. Trees had come down at the front of our road, so we couldn't leave our house. The CFA came and checked on us within a couple of hours. We were really fortunate. The scary part about that experience is that we had quite a few trees around our house. No trees fell down on the house, so we were safe, but we had that conversation because, while phones are very convenient, when there's no internet and no phone reception, they're the most useless things in the world. Like many houses, we don't have a land line, so we had that conversation in that moment. If a tree had fallen on our house and my wife, our children or I had been hurt, we'd have had literally no ability to get out or to get help. The cars couldn't leave the driveway. It's a moment where you realise how vulnerable you are.

Bushfires are another significant threat in our community. I lived through Black Saturday. The 2019 bushfires live with us all. The CFA have said we were fortunate, in a way, that the storms were a static event. It was a significant event, but it wasn't a dynamic, fast-moving event. Communication was a significant issue, but it wasn't as significant as if it were a bushfire and we were trying to get updates on the spot. That's what we're talking about.

To highlight the challenges from an emergency services perspective: I spoke to Sarah, who's a friend of mine I have known for many years from the Sassafras-Ferny Creek CFA. During the storms, the only way they could communicate was by having her mobile phone placed on one little spot in their station. She was trying to text people. If she moved it even a centimetre, she said, it felt like it would drop in and out. That was how the CFA across the Dandenong ranges were trying to communicate with each other in the middle of the night with trees continuing to fall down. The Emerald SES had one of their vehicles crushed on that night. By luck, the two SES members weren't in the vehicle, but, again, if they had been and they'd been hit, they'd have had no ability to call for support or for help during that storm.

So I do want to pay tribute to all our volunteers. They don't get paid for this. They are volunteers that have left their families in the middle of the night, in pitch dark, to go help other people, to put their lives on the line. What we need to do as governments—and this is not a criticism of the government; this is bipartisan, because I acknowledge it is a challenging situation with the terrain and the topography. It's not about politics; it's about working in a bipartisan way to make them as safe as possible so that, when they risk their lives to protect our community, they have the communications they need to call for backup. I understand it's challenging, but the frustration my community has—and it's happened previously; it's not about this government—is about things like the Mobile Network Hardening Program. When the community is not able to get funding and is told it is a metropolitan area, it furthers that frustration for us. I am really grateful; I didn't expect the minister to be here, but I'm glad I could share those stories on behalf of my community. I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you on that.

We've got people that are lucky, but it's also about resilience and the reality that NBN and communications are essential services in emergencies but also day to day in our community. Belinda Young, from Mums of the Hills, has been an amazing advocate for this. You need to understand: if you live in the Dandenong Ranges or you live in the Upper Yarra or Yarra Valley, your neighbour is not 15 or 20 metres away; they are kilometres away. Even if they're next door, you've got a couple of kays up your driveway and a couple of kays around. You cannot just walk to your neighbours. Isolation, for mums in particular and young mothers at home with their children, is a significant issue. Being able to communicate with their friends on their phones through Facebook and social media is so crucial.

I want to share how Mums of the Hills started, because it's an important story that highlights how important communications are. Belinda founded Mums of the Hills because she'd moved to the area and her husband was at work. She was at home with their young son and she fell off a ladder and hurt herself. She was lucky that it wasn't significant. It was in that moment that she realised she didn't know anyone in the area that could support her. She literally couldn't walk, but even if she could, she wouldn't have been able to walk to the neighbours because she was living in the Dandenong. That's how she founded Mum of the Hills, as a Facebook group to support mums as they go through challenges and to build that connection. This is the only way, as I said, that these mums can initially communicate.

I didn't stay at home, but my wife reminds me often that, even if you can duck out, with a couple of young kids, it's not five minutes; there is a process you need to go through. This network of friends, through Facebook, is really important. They got through COVID as a community, and they continue to support each other through financial challenges and other challenges. I know Belinda has spent a lot of time advocating for communications as an essential service. I want to thank her for her advocacy and continue to support her. We need to do more in this regard.

It's not just the Dandenong but it's also our farming communities in the Yarra Valley that have challenges. Last year, as an example, a satellite went down and tractors across the country stopped working. Farmers weren't able to farm. It's a great example of the advantages of the digital economy and of the productivity gains and efficiencies we can get from technology and digital, but, if we're so reliant on it and if we've got no redundancy in our system, that creates risk. That's why we need to continue to make sure that, in our regional farming communities, NBN isn't a 'nice-to-have.' As the member for Indi said, we don't want a strong NBN just so we can watch Netflix. We need a strong connection to the internet so we can farm, so we can work from home if we need to and so kids can access schooling from home, as we saw through COVID. It's a way of being able to just live—and I don't want to use the term 'normally', but it's having the basic ability to communicate. If something happens, your neighbours are not two minutes away; they're a long way away.

I spoke about this in my first speech. I think we need to look at understanding the new technologies that are available. Satellite communication is moving at a rapid pace. It provides opportunities that can alleviate some of the geographical and topographical challenges that we face. I understand we're moving down an NBN path, and that is important, but I believe—whether it's NBN or private partnerships—we need to look at how we can maximise satellites to solve some of these challenges in hard-to-reach places, in areas like mine where there are valleys and mountains, where geography plays a huge part in the challenges we face. Satellites provide that opportunity.

We talk a lot about communications. For many people it is about better internet access for Netflix and for living their lives, working from home in the suburbs in Middle Australia. That's important. I don't denigrate that, but there's a reason that a lot of regional, rural and peri-urban members have spoken today. It's because this is one of the biggest challenges our communities face.

I'll finish by thanking the minister for being here to listen. I look forward to continuing to work with her on some bipartisan solutions for my community and many other communities as well.

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