Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to bring to the House’s attention concerns I have about the way the Rudd government rammed through a bill and guillotined debate on telecommunications. Last night a bill called the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Communications Fund) Bill 2008 was rammed through the House of Representatives. This bill should have been called the ‘Telecommunications (Raid Fund) Bill’. It is allowing them to take $2 billion set aside in a fund for regional and rural communications. This fund was to provide its earnings for upgrading and support in regional and rural areas.

We all went through the pain of the sale of Telstra, and one of the issues coming out of the Estens review was that money would be set aside for regional and rural areas. Members opposite spoke long and hard about regional and rural areas and funding requirements and telecommunications. I remember that it was actually the former Labor government that signed off on a digital network without any replacement for the analog network, and it left massive black holes in my constituency in communications.

It was former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer who went out and sought the introduction of the CDMA network, which works across regional and rural areas. It was through the allocation of specific funding that towers were put up throughout areas in my electorate, such as Dungog, Gloucester, Stroud and many other areas, to provide telephone communications. We will now see $2 billion stripped out of the fund and that money will be moved to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as the government embark on this digital network fibre-optic cable that they want to install. In regional and rural areas the only way to get high-speed internet access is through wireless communications. In many areas of my electorate, particularly around Barrington Tops and Gloucester, there are a lot of valleys and a lot of areas that are a long way from mainstream communications. In fact, a lot of people in my area do not even receive terrestrial television; they have to subscribe to satellite television because terrestrial television is not there. It was through the efforts of the Howard government and a lot of lobbying that we got television black spot funding and specialised towers put in to address the needs and the concerns of our community. We see this $2 billion raid on people in regional and rural areas as a disgrace, and that disgrace was amplified by the fact that the bill was guillotined last night, denying members in regional and rural areas the opportunity to speak. I also noticed that there were very few words spoken by members of the Labor Party in regional and rural areas against this raid on money that was set aside for their constituencies to improve communications. It proves that they are hypocritical in the extreme.