Mr SNOWDON (12:57 PM) —It is my pleasure to be able to contribute to this discussion this morning. I would like to congratulate the Joint Standing Committee on the National Capital and External Territories on the work that it has done in the preparation of the report on Australia's external territories and to thank the secretariat. I have only been part of the committee since October and I must say that I neither was part of the formal inquiry process nor did I seek to intervene or interfere with the deliberations of the committee in terms of its recommendations. Having said that though, I have read the report with a great deal of interest and—as you would know, Mr Speaker—Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands are in my electorate and I have travelled there many times over more than a decade. I would like to say that the comments of the previous speaker highlight the importance of telecommunications infrastructure to remote Australians and most particularly to people who live in the Indian Ocean territories. I know the same is true for Norfolk Island, but they have a very different legal relationship with the Australian government than do the people of Christmas and Cocos islands, and it is to those people and their communities that I want to address my remarks this morning.

The previous speaker addressed the issue of telecommunications, Internet provision, mail services, transport services and broadcasting. He underlined the merits of this report in the comments he made. He prefaced his remarks by talking about the isolation which people in these communities suffer. I think it is fair to say that, in line with some other Australians who live in rural and remote Australia, people who live on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands go without. They go without because they do not have the same level of access to information services. They do not have a reliable mail service. They do not have a reliable transport service. At times I have been on planes when the mail has been left off the plane because there has been no room for it and it has not been a priority for the carrier. Frankly, that is not good enough.

Mail not arriving creates all sorts of potential impediments. Most of us who live on mainland Australia, at least those who live on the eastern seaboard, expect daily access to mail services. The fact is that you may or may not get a mail service on Christmas Island or the Cocos Islands, depending upon flights and the availability of freight space. Your everyday activities are affected by this sort of thing. For example, you may be a student applying for a position at a university and find that because of mail delays your application arrives late or when transferring legal documents your application may arrive late. There are all sorts of impediments to the daily lives of people, whether in business or in their private lives, as a result of a mail service which is inadequate.

The same sorts of handicaps prevail with telecommunications infrastructure and access to Internet. I think it is reasonable to assert that people who live in these sorts of isolated circumstances are information poor. Frankly, this report highlights the fact that to participate actively in our democracy you need to have access to the full range of information services. If you live in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or even Darwin, you can get access online to the full range of services that are available to you here in Canberra but if you live on Christmas Island you cannot. This morning I was talking to Brian Hill, who is the Internet service provider on Christmas Island. The charge for him to have a 64-kilobit line on Christmas Island is around $60,000 a year. That cost is exorbitant and he cannot provide the same level of service available to people on the mainland at an efficient price with the cost demanded of him by Telstra.

I note the report makes the very valid point about the community service obligations. The islands in the Indian Ocean territory have been declared net cost areas by the ACA. This means they are potentially loss making areas for universal service provider Telstra, who may lodge a claim for the loss incurred in supplying service to those areas as part of the USO scheme. There is absolutely no excuse for Telstra to not do more in these communities. They know already, by the way in which it has been described, that they can provide these services and charge them as a loss against the total universal service obligation. They need to do a great deal more.