Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the last couple of weeks, we've had excessive amounts of rain in the Top End of the Northern Territory, and at least 4,000 residents spent three days without access to Telstra services. This affected communities such as Daly River, Wadeye, Peppimenarti, Palumpa or Nganmarriyanga and surrounding outstations. In fact, the Daly River community had to be evacuated, and 400 people were evacuated to the showgrounds in Darwin. The important thing here is that, apart from the evacuation, with the telecommunications failing, people had no phone lines or online access for three to four days. Fuel, internet, phones and electronic transactions were affected. The Centrelink BasicsCards were unusable. You couldn't get access to the shop for power, BasicsCard purchases or to withdraw money. For a welfare-dependent community, where 70 per cent of income is income managed via the BasicsCard, it's a totally unacceptable situation, because these people are suffering as a result of the conditions under which they are placed.

There are, as we know, constant holes in the BasicsCard, and the wet season doesn't help. Everything grinds to a halt when this happens—businesses included. In these times, there is not much awareness of when things can come back online, with no mechanism to find out because there's no way of communicating and, of course, with Telstra grounded because they can't fly.

There are really difficult situations which I don't think the broader Australian community understands: no food, theoretically, would be available for people for up to three or four days because they couldn't get access to the store. This happens across the Top End, depending on where the storms and cyclones impact.

Marion Scrymgour, the CEO of the Tiwi Islands council, said: 'It has a huge impact. It's something that policy makers and government people have not thought about. This happens quite a bit. With the wet season, when communications go down, it means people cannot go to the shop with their BasicsCard and buy what they need. Families can go two or three days without access,' and all that that entails. Scott McIntyre from Wadeye said this: 'The phone lines were down for three to four days last week, and we've seen it happen before. It has a major impact on the communities and business. The most notable thing is the impact of people on the ground. You don't know if it will be two days or two weeks. It's noticeable there is no plan B to handle it.'

I would say: this is a matter to be taken up by Commonwealth agencies, along with the agencies from the Northern Territory government and local governments within these communities, to try and find ways of addressing these problems, along with Telstra, when the wet season occurs and these services are so affected.