David Littleproud (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Can I acknowledge the member for Grayndler, who spoke before me. It is great to see you get a run here in the Fed. Chamber! Unfortunately, you did not get another question today in question time. If you stick with it, I am sure that you will, hopefully, have the first one to the Prime Minister tomorrow on an important issue of education—that we have lifted funding for every school in Maranoa. It is great to see the member for Grayndler get an opportunity in the Federation Chamber. He cannot get into the main chamber, but, if he sticks with it, maybe the Leader of the Opposition will give him a crack in the next couple of days and let him ask a question. The member for Grayndler is a great supporter of the people of Maranoa. In fact, he has visited the people of Maranoa on a number of occasions, which I do acknowledge. That is why I acknowledge the member for Grayndler, and I do hope that the opposition leader gives him the opportunity to ask a question very soon, because we like to see him. We miss him!

But I digress. Today I want to talk about roaming. In the last couple of weeks, the ACCC handed down its interim finding into mobile phone roaming. Mobile phone roaming allows for customers to have access to mobile phone towers of other companies that they may not subscribe to. It is an important aspect of telecommunications, particularly in my electorate of Maranoa, which covers 42 per cent of Queensland—nearly 10 per cent of the Australian land mass. To provide continuity of telecommunications, particularly in mobile phones, across my electorate is so important. It is important that we are able to provide continuity to those people and give them the tools of the 21st century that we rely on to do business so they can take advantage of the trade agreements that we as a federal government have put in place over the last four years with Japan, China and South Korea, and we are moving towards one with Singapore. And I think there will also be a great opportunity with Indonesia. The people in my electorate need the tools of the 21st century to be able to do trade, to be able to sit on their highly sophisticated and very expensive machinery while planting cotton or wheat, to be able to utilise the technology that they have on those pieces of machinery, to be able to use the multimillion dollar businesses that they run, to be able to provide the infrastructure for them to trade, and to be able to take advantage of the free trade agreements that we as a government have put in place.

Mobile phone roaming is important to my electorate, and I understand that the ACCC has said in its interim finding that it will not support the mandating of that. I respect the umpire's decision, but I am a little miffed by some of the findings in the report. Mobile phone roaming has been inquired into two previous times. In those two previous inquiries, the ACCC did not mandate roaming because it believed that the market would sort itself out and come to the conclusion that it would be viable. Unfortunately, that has not happened over the ensuing period. But this time, unfortunately, the ACCC has abandoned that methodology and has, in fact, made its decision predicated on the fear of further investment in infrastructure on mobile phone towers across regional and rural Australia.

I have to congratulate Telstra. They ran a fantastic fear campaign in articulating the case that they would not invest further dollars into rural and regional telecommunications if roaming were mandated, because, effectively, they have a monopoly. In my electorate alone, they have a significant monopoly and we do not have the opportunity of choice. I believe quite passionately that the people in rural and regional Australia should have the same opportunities as those in metropolitan Australia. The reality is that it is not a commercial case for any telecommunications company to, effectively, duplicate the infrastructure across rural and regional Australia, because of the vast distances that we have. But that should not mean that people in rural and regional Australia should not enjoy the same competitive tension that is in metropolitan areas. A pragmatic and realistic opportunity was missed.

But we need to understand why the campaign was undertaken by Telstra. Telstra has around 17 million customers across the country, and every one of us who is signed up to Telstra pays a premium. If you walk into the Telstra store in Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne and ask the assistant why you should choose Telstra over one of their competitors, the answer will be, quite clearly and loudly, that Telstra provides a far more significant network across this country. But to sign up to that you will pay a premium. Every one of the 17 million Australians who have signed up to Telstra will pay a premium, because they have a superior network across the country. You pay that premium and in fact it amounts to billions of dollars that Telstra is taking because of the superior network they are providing.

Unfortunately, I have not seen those billions of dollars invested in the telecommunications infrastructure in my electorate. We have put in place our Mobile Black Spot Program, something that was never thought of before we came into government, before Fiona Nash, the first regional telecommunications minister in cabinet in the nation's history, which shows that we passionately believe in telecommunications and rural and regional Australia. Labor did nothing for all the time that they are there. They would not even know where the Great Dividing Range is, let alone what rural and regional Australia may be. We put $220 million into telecommunications in the bush. Telstra has had to come with us, with our hand holding them all the way to help them to invest in rural and regional Australia.

Unfortunately, their friends at Optus also oppose mandated roaming. They believed they would no longer make the infrastructure spend if mandated roaming came into effect. They let the cat out of the bag at the Universal Service Obligation hearing in Sydney, at which I was sitting down the back. Their representative, when was asked about the Mobile Black Spot Program, said it was a great program initiated by this federal government but they would not see the commercial viability in undertaking further rounds of the Mobile Black Spot Program. So, effectively, this argument about further infrastructure investment for mobile phone infrastructure in the bush is nothing more than a furphy. The telcos have sold us a pup, because the reality is that Telstra is taking billions of dollars but is not investing it. So they are using the bush as a sales pitch to get more customers in the city, where it is commercially viable, but they are not investing in the bush. When this finding became public, I wrote to Andy Penn and asked him to come back to me by tomorrow to tell me, shire by shire and town by town, what the infrastructure spend will be in my electorate of Maranoa if mandated roaming is not provided. I am yet to get that response, but I hope that I do, because he and his company had been on a grand publicity tour through Maranoa talking about the virtues of keeping roaming out of our marketplace, saying that they are going to invest billions of dollars. Well, their money needs to come out and they need to articulate quite clearly where they are going to invest in the electorate of Maranoa and in all regional and rural Australia.

But there is also an opportunity to look forward—to look pragmatically at the total of our telecommunications policies. The Productivity Commission has just handed down a report on the Universal Service Obligation. It was set up to look at pay phones and landlines. We all know that the advent of pay phones is just about over—they have had their day. $300 million a year goes to Telstra to administer the Universal Service Obligation. Now is an opportunity to look at mandated roaming and the USO in unison. If you mandated roaming and you re-looked at the USO you could actually ensure that the telcos invested more into the USO—apart from just Telstra, but the Vodafones and Optuses of this world—to start a fund that would initiate the growth infrastructure that we need in rural and regional Australia to give us the tools of the 21st century to move forward.

This is a pragmatic way to look at telecommunications policy for rural and regional Australia—to combine mandated roaming and the USO into one; to have the USO not only for landlines, because we need to landlines. In my electorate, where we do not have towers, the reality is that landlines are life and death. We need to have a base internet service but we could also have mandated roaming, where we could continue to increase the expansion of infrastructure and the network across regional and rural Australia that would ensure that we continue to get the tools of the 21st century we need. This is a pragmatic and honest way of looking at telecommunications in the bush. We need mobility in how we do business. I am proud to say that we have taken great steps, but it is now important that the telecommunications industry comes with us, because if they do not they will only impede the people, the engine room, of this nation in my electorate of Maranoa.