I always enjoy speaking on motions that have a strong regional flavour because, despite the fact that I represent an outer suburban electorate today, my heart can't help but remain in the country around Broken Hill where I was brought up and where I spent many years working on sheep and cattle stations. While people in the city in the early 2000s were getting used to mobile phones—we hadn't even heard of them out where we were—I used a GPS, which was a little yellow brick that sat on my motorbike, and, if it wasn't for that, I think I would've still been out there and they would've still been looking for my bones. Meanwhile, people in the cities didn't know what GPS actually meant. Communications have come a long way over the last 20 years. Now people almost take for granted that they've got mobile phone coverage in a lot of the areas where they didn't even know what a mobile phone was 20 years ago.

I also appreciate how vital communication is in a disaster. My mum used to live in Oxley in Brisbane, and during the 2010 floods her house flooded. That was the first of the big natural disasters that we've had in my lifetime. That time was traumatic for so many reasons. One of them was because communications went down. When a friend, who was a refugee from the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, told me that this lack of communications, where people couldn't get in touch with family anymore, was exactly like it was in a time of war, that really brought home for me how desperate a situation is when you can't find out whether your family members are safe or not. As it was 2010, so it was in 2022, when we had the floods that hit the Logan region. My mum's house flooded again and much of South-East Queensland went under water again, and the communications network went down. It really did underscore that we are coming to a time when our technology really should be above that. It shouldn't be so hard for telcos to provide batteries or backup or extra network coverage. It shouldn't be beyond them to provide that now.

In the time that I have in this place, I want to emphasise what drives me the most, and that is that, in our country, over the last 30 or 40 years, we have seen a move away from government playing a central role in our economy. Telecommunications was one role. Privatisation, economic rationalism and unfettered free trade are the things which have really decimated working-class communities. When we had a telecom which was publicly owned and was interested in the public good, the outcomes that we achieved were much better than the outcomes that we get today. Telecommunications is not a nice-to-have; telecommunications is a must-have. It is essential to the operation of families, friends and social contact, and it is essential to the operation of the economy as well.

I think that the telcos need to do so much better. It's not just in a disaster that people find it hard to make a phone call. There are so many suburbs in the electorate of Forde—stretching from the northern Gold Coast and Upper Coomera to Boronia Heights at the other end of the electorate, in western Logan—where, on a good day, people have to stand on their driveway with their elbow bent at 90 degrees in order to get reception to make a telephone call. It's just not good enough.

So the government really is making sure that it puts these telcos on notice that they need to do better. But, practically, it is also doing what it can at the moment to make sure that people have the support that they need. There is a $1 billion investment into regional telecommunications, new towers and batteries. Increasing that investment is going to go a long way towards fixing some of the problems that regional communities have. The government is actually getting on with the job of replacing the copper network with high-speed broadband so that people can make communications through that. There are also agreements with satellite providers to cover areas where fixed NBN services don't get cover, which is not just out the back of Bourke but also in some areas of Forde.

To that end, while I see the good intentions of this motion, I seek to see it opposed.