Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the electorate of Boothby, we have a number of well-known institutions—the Flinders University, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Waite Institute of the University of Adelaide, which comprises the CSIRO, industry organisations as well as the university.

The 2001 census figures showed that one-third of Boothby residents used the internet at home. Those figures would, of course, be much higher now, but that still put the electorate of Boothby just outside the top one-fifth of electorates in Australia in this respect. So residents in my electorate do expect access to the latest technologies; they do expect access to broadband, and the fastest broadband. I was pleased to table a petition recently from 40 residents of my electorate—residents of Flagstaff Hill as well as Aberfoyle Park and other suburbs. With respect to some of the issues, they were asking for better access to ADSL broadband in their suburbs. In the newer subdivisions there are pair gain problems; sometimes there are hard-to-reach areas which are too far from the exchanges. Sometimes the exchanges have not been enabled for broadband, but that problem has been fixed.

There are a couple of new initiatives that I do welcome. I refer, firstly, to the $600 million announced recently by the Australian government to encourage private sector rollouts of broadband infrastructure and, secondly, to Telstra’s announcement last week of their new wireless network, the 3G broadband network, which will also provide high-speed broadband to those people in difficult-to-reach areas.

This offers people who currently do not have broadband a couple of alternatives. Firstly, there is the alternative of the wireless broadband rollout which is being done by Telstra. I am advised by Telstra that this should cover all residents in my electorate. If they do not already have access to ADSL over the phone, they can get broadband through the wireless. The second alternative is that there are a number of providers other than Telstra. For example, in Flagstaff Hill Agile, Adamdirect and Chime(iiNet) also all provide ADSL2+. So there are a number of solutions for my residents. I welcome the two recent announcements of the $600 million to encourage private sector rollouts of broadband infrastructure and also Telstra’s recent announcement that they will be going ahead with their wireless network.