Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Right now there are thousands of households and businesses in my electorate trying to get by with unreliable and slow dial-up or impossibly expensive satellite internet. Broadband with high speed and low latency for them has become an impossible dream. It did not have to be so. It was the Labor government which cancelled the Howard government’s $2 billion contract with Optus and Elders to deliver metro-equivalent broadband services to regional and remote parts of our country, including of course in my own electorate. The vastly improved services under that OPEL contract would be coming online now if the contract had been upheld. Families in rural and regional Australia would have been able to compete on an equal footing in business and education communications with those in the cities. Instead, halfway through this government’s term, Labor has not done anything to improve broadband services in rural and regional Australia. If anything, it has made the situation worse, cancelling OPEL and dissolving the $2.4 billion communications fund which was an in-perpetuity fund to provide improved services to regional and rural Australia.

As if the collapse of Labor’s first national broadband project was not bad enough, Labor has committed itself to building a fibre-to-the-premise network which leaves more than two million people outside its latest broadband announcement—two million people from rural and regional Australia—and specifically excludes towns and communities across Australia with fewer than 1,000 residents. Towns in my electorate which will miss out include Beachport, Blanchetown, Cadell, Callington, Cobdogla, Coonalpyn, Kalangadoo, Karoonda, Lameroo, Lucindale, Meningie, Morgan, Mount Burr, Nangwarry, Paringa, Pinnaroo, Port MacDonnell, Swan Reach, Tantanoola, Tarpeena, Tintinara, Truro and others. We are not talking outback towns; some of them are just over one hour from Adelaide. It does not have to be so.

Last, week a young man whose parents live in Coonalpyn in my electorate wrote to me. Coonalpyn is a small town with a population of just over 200 residents in a farming community. This young man put to me that just because a town is excluded by the Labor government from being part of the National Broadband Network on account of population, it is unacceptable that they be left to put up with slow speeds, dial-up or even satellite broadband. I do not deny that satellite has been a blessing for many farm families and communities. However, satellite broadband users miss out on many of the associated benefits of high-speed, low-latency broadband, including MSN, Skype, ABC iView et cetera. Certainly our young rural people can only envy these services already highly used by their city cousins. He further pointed out to me that private companies Internode and Agile have endeavoured to solve this problem by building infrastructure throughout the Coorong district region with low-maintenance, solar powered transmitters which provide a wide-reaching area. This is a great example of a local solution for a local problem. Internode started as a small company in the Coorong communications network providing ADSL2+ and Naked DSL access to small towns such as Coonalpyn, Tintinara, Tailem Bend and Meningie.

These small companies have ensured that these towns can now receive ADSL at 22 megabits per second, a significant improvement. Simply put: the young man stated that there is no reason that the exchanges in the towns I previously listed cannot have fibre to the exchange of similar nature, then provide a town-based copper broadband structure or implement a wireless alternative for those for whom that is not possible. I should add that under OPEL many exchanges in my electorate would have already been upgraded in exactly this manner. The point is: if a small company with limited resources can identify a problem and then solve it, why can’t the Labor government do the same? Instead of denying regional communities the broadband service they would have been receiving this year under the OPEL contract and then making them pay for the $43 billion network that will not reach them, why can’t Labor come down from their ivory city towers and talk to companies who have made it happen? Who knows, they might learn something about communications for rural and regional Australia.