Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

This issue in regional Australia is so very, very important. At the start, we had a thing called CDMA. It didn't carry much data, but it had a huge range. It used to be remarkable. When I was out at Saint George—you'd be miles away and you could get CDMA. You could get on the phone. If you broke down or something happened or there was a crash or you needed to get spare parts, CDMA worked. And then they said: 'No. CDMA's no good anymore. We're going to a thing called 2G.' The range got smaller, and they said: 'Don't worry. We'll push it out a bit.'

At that point in time, the coalition, to give them their dues—I was part of it—had the Telstra debate, and part of that legislation that went through was because the Labor Party sold 49 per cent of Telstra and they had the remainder. It wasn't about the sale of Telstra. We're talking about the sale of the remainder of Telstra. We only had to sell two per cent, and we lost control of it. Peter Costello, at that stage, decided he'd balance the books by paying off the debt by selling Telstra. I argued against it at the time. Probably, with hindsight, it was the right thing to do because the value of Telstra went down yet the debt was cleared. That's how, when people talk about how the coalition was not in debt, they did it. They sold Telstra to do it.

Nonetheless, I digress. What happened after that in that negotiation—I'd just arrived in parliament. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. It was 2005. I'd never been in parliament and neither had any of my staff. At that stage, I'd won with the Queensland Nationals, which no longer exist, and we actually competed against the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party tried to get rid of me. It might happen again. But we actually prevailed, and then we had a majority of one in the Senate, and that was my vote. Because they campaigned against me, I didn't feel obligated in any way, shape or form to play ball. So I held down my vote. There was a fund. We got $2 billion of that.

Then, in the next term, the Liberal Party voted with the coalition—the Nationals supported them—to get rid of the fund. That was smart. Then there were the Universal Service Obligation, the Network Reliability Framework, the Customer Service Guarantee, the Network Reliability Framework—a whole range of conditions that were put in place that Telstra had to put in place to keep their licence. I can do this without notes because I'm very across this. It's part of my life.

Then we went to 2G. We said to them, 'You can't go to 2G unless you're offering the same coverage as what you had with CDMA.' So we subsidised a whole lot of mobile phone towers to get built all around the countryside. They said, 'We just don't get a return from a tower,' so we had bidding form. If we were going to put a tower up in, say, the seat of Cook, we'd say: 'There's money there. The ones that come up and ask us for the least amount of money get that to build a tower in the seat of Cook.' And off it went. There were 55 towers built in the seat of New England.

Then they went to 3G. We said, '3G's fine.' All of a sudden, they could start moving more data. The world became consumed by data. Banks wanted to move bigger files and they needed more bandwidth to do that, and so it went to 3G. But, of course, the more data you move the more your range constricts in and the more you have to supplement that by new towers to get things out.

So we had 3G come in, and we had to build more towers. That was fine, but the market in Sydney and other areas relied absolutely on the growth of the programs that were coming out from stockbrokers, from banks and from online delivery of films. Netflix and YouTube required more data again, so they went to 4G, buying the spectrum up. The spectrum became worth a lot of money, so they went into buying spectrum. And to get into buying spectrum they have to retire previous spectrum. When they retired spectrum those on the peripheries, regional areas, lost their mobile phone service. There's always a promise: 'Don't worry. We'll come back and we'll fix it up.' But they started falling off the log a bit on this one, and the Network Reliability Framework and the Customer Service Guarantee and the Universal Service Obligation—as I said, you're not complying with these anymore. They'll tell you not to worry about it, that they'll fix it up in the future, it's all under control and everything's hunky dory. Then came 4G and, of course, now we've got 5G. With 5G, it's almost like a line of sight, to be able to move with a big bandwidth. You can move massive amounts of files. It's great for your banking. You can download your movies. You can do it on your phone. It's marvellous stuff, except that now people on 3G get closed down. They have to grab that bandwidth back.

There are all those people who relied on it in the country if you had an accident. We had, the other day, a tragic accident on the highway near Moonbi. A person was killed. It was a truck, and it went into a car. They shut down the highway near Moonbi, so all these cars, from a national highway, started going up the Danglemah Road, which I live on. So the Danglemah Road, a dirt road, turned into the New England Highway, and these people didn't really understand that it's a single-lane road. As I went along, one truck had been pushed just off the edge, on the side of a cliff. It was just hanging on there. We—I didn't, but people from my property did—had to put chains on it so it didn't tip over. That person could have been killed. They went to ring—of course, no reception. Especially in remote areas, when someone has a heart attack, they've got to get on the phone. There's no reception. Even for a simple thing, like a person getting a flat tyre who's probably not able to fix it—that's most of this building!—there's no reception. They can't do it.

It's a fundamental occupational health and safety issue in regional Australia that you have a mobile phone reception. It is very, very dangerous if you don't. Every person who's been in regional Australia will tell you about the time they came across an accident. They came across an accident. There were people on the side of the road. The car's disappeared. They just happened to catch a glimpse of it. It's gone off the road, to the side. There's the immediate panic you have: 'I must get the police here; I must get an ambulance here, I've got to find out.' And, if you don't have reception, well, what are you going to do? You can't leave the people. What do you do? Light a little fire? I mean, how does this work? You've got to have mobile phone reception, and we're losing it since they went to 5G.

So how are we going to deal with this? Well, where a lot of people will go—and are going—is to Mr Elon Musk with his Starlink—with mobile Starlink. That's where they're off to. That's because we're going right away from any protections in Australia and using delivery of a foreign service, which, of course, should something go wrong, can be shut down, when we should be relying on telecommunications being delivered as promised through the Universal Service Obligation. So we call on the government to actually own this and go out to areas and say, 'If you're not complying with the Universal Service Obligation, the network reliability framework or the customer service guarantee, you put at risk your licence for having a telecommunications company.'

So let's talk about how you get more towers out, because the only way you solve this problem is to get more mobile phone towers out. Every time that bandwidth is utilised for 5G—after it will come 6G—more and more volume is required, so less and less area is able to be covered. There have to be more and more mobile phone towers put out around the nation. Lately, in regional areas, that's just fallen off of a perch. I must admit that the coalition were very good at getting out mobile phone towers. But, just observing—I'm not suggesting anything, but I'm observing—where a few mobile phone towers have been going, one might suggest that they're going into Labor electorates. One might suggest that. One might suggest that there seem to be quite a few going in around a place called Bega, but we are not getting any new ones out in other regional areas. This in itself means that there is a diminished standard of living and diminished potential in regional areas.

Even now, mobile phone receptions are utilised by mechanics. For a lot of machinery now, if a bearing's overheating or something else is going wrong, a message—in some instances sent to the tower, sent to Detroit if it's John Deere, or sent back to the dealership—tells you to turn off your tractor, because, if you keep it running, it's going to go from a $6,000 bill to a $60,000 bill and cost you a lot of money.

This Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025 has to have the meat put on the bone so that the government will own the responsibility to get out into regional areas to have discussions with the community and say, 'Where did you use to get reception that you no longer get reception?' and at the very least match what they had, because they don't have it. What I have seen in following this is that every office in regional Australia becomes a lightning rod for telephone complaints. What I have seen is that when you say to them, 'This area that you used to get reception in no longer gets reception,' they come out with the greatest weasel words. They say, 'In the past that was just fortuitous reception.' It's like you were just lucky it happened. Luck had nothing to do with it. They had reception and now they don't.

In closing, on Monday mornings I do a piece on Sunrise. There's a hill behind my place, and I've got a track and it goes right up this hill. It's quite steep. It'd be 800 or 900 metres—I suppose 800 metres—at the top. People say, 'You go up there because there's a beautiful view and the sun's rising and it looks wonderful; you and Tanya get out there and get the ratings for Channel 7 and have a whale of a time.' The reason I go up that hill is for mobile phone reception. That's why I go up the hill. If I didn't go up the hill, we wouldn't have the reception to be able to relay that program to the tower.

From that area I get 5G because I can see the tower. It's on top of the Moonbi Range. It's just over there, and it's that line-of-sight reception that I get. I used to be able to get reception. Every time they changed the telephone, the 5G to 2G, I used to have to go further and further up the hill to get reception. Now I'm at the top of the hill. I'm at the top of my game, but there's no more hill to go up. I'm going to have to buy the neighbour's place to go any further up. So, if they knock off any more of this, I am out of luck and I say to Sunrise, 'I'm sorry about that; I just didn't have a higher hill.'

So let's see that if this obligation is actually fulfilled. Let's see if the rhetoric turns into reality. Let's see if you actually deliver what was promised. Might I remind you what you voted for back in 2005. It was a long time ago, but you did. You voted for these responsibilities, these obligations, and even though it's later on you've got to honour them in 2026.

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