John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

having his say from his seat over there. And it is Senator Wacka, by the way, Minister! I look back on telecommunications over my lifetime and I think back to the days in Jamestown in South Australia when we had the manual exchange and then we went to automatic—what a great update that was. When I moved to Inverell in 1979, to a farm near Bukkulla, three or four miles down the road, we went back to a manual exchange. If you wanted to ring someone at lunchtime, between one and two, you turned the handle to dial and you would hear, ‘Are you calling Bukkulla? The exchange is closed for lunch.’ As time went on we too went to automatic, which was good. On many occasions I would ring my father to say hello and three minutes into the conversation there would be an interruption: ‘Three minutes has expired. Are you extending?’ Well, you never extended; you could never afford to extend. It had already cost you $3 for three minutes or something to call South Australia. Thank goodness, as time progressed, calls got much cheaper and the service much, much better.