Mr SNOWDON (12:39 PM) —Firstly, let me acknowledge the interesting contribution from the member for Kennedy. Whilst I can identify and support much of what he said, I am not sure that I agree with all of the sentiments that he expressed towards our colleague here the member for Parkes. I will say to the member for Parkes, though, that he has a problem. Good comrade that he is, the member for Parkes has got a problem. You cannot walk both sides of the street, and that is what the National Party are intending to do and trying to do.

I have in front of me, as it happens, a document titled Future proofing telecommunications in non-metropolitan Australia, a position paper from the Page Research Centre Ltd, which I understand was launched today at midday. I have not had time to read it all but I just want to note who wrote this paper. The Page Research Centre is an organisation run by the National Party. The Telecommunications Advisory Group was Senator elect Fiona Nash as chair, Senator elect Barnaby Joyce as deputy chair and Mr Troy Whitford as secretary. If I were the National Party I would be thinking about reading this document before I supported this piece of legislation, if for no other reason than to satisfy myself that those people who are responsible for authoring this document and who have a responsibility as the Telecommunications Advisory Group for the National Party in terms of this Page inquiry know what they are talking about. You should read this document to get some agreement amongst yourselves about what it is you are prepared to support or not support. The fact is—as the member for Kennedy so eloquently put it, though some might say ‘eloquently’ is stretching it—there is no case for the bush to accept the possibility of the full sale of Telstra.

I live in a remote part of Australia. All of the Northern Territory—except Darwin—and Christmas and Cocos islands are my electorate. I have described time and time again in this place the difficulties that electors and citizens in the seat of Lingiari confront when dealing with the issue of telecommunications. This happens whether or not you are a resident in Alice Springs, which is the largest town—not large by Sydney standards; it has only 28,000 people so it is not a big town—and you would think that in an environment where the government is proposing to sell off Telstra there would be no questions about service standards or access to services by the people of Alice Springs. Yet there are. The reason there are questions about the service standards of Alice Springs is that the infrastructure is simply not up to scratch. I have got ADSL in my house but people within a kilometre cannot get it. You have to ask the question: if things are so hunky-dory, why would people in Alice Springs be having difficulty getting access to decent telecommunications infrastructure, the most modern telecommunications infrastructure?

It is worth looking at this document from the Page Research Centre—not that I would be acknowledging necessarily my support for this document. They try to give a definition of the word ‘parity’, emphasising the importance of parity between metropolitan and non-metropolitan communities. They define ‘parity’ as: carrying the sense of an equivalent ability to complete telecommunication tasks at equivalent cost. I would add: at equivalent speed with access to bandwidth of equivalent size—all of the things that make living in Canberra so comfortable.

You do not have to worry if you live in Canberra—no problem—but if you live in Alice Springs you have a problem and, worse, if you live on a cattle station in the Gulf Country you have a problem; you might have to wait weeks for service. I recall in one instance people on Amungee Mungee station had to wait three weeks to get someone to come and fix the phone. Then there is the community of Palumpa, where there is not enough infrastructure to meet the demand for telephone services because it has been undercapitalised in the first instance. It takes four weeks to get a phone on. You have to ask yourself: why is it that these people—in this case, a remote Aboriginal community—have to confront these sorts of difficulties?

Then, of course, there are the situations that occur often throughout the north of Australia where the telecommunications fall over for whatever reason. Someone might put a backhoe through a cable or there might be electrical faults—a range of things could happen. But what we know is that the Telstra technical staff, as efficient and as good as they are, are totally under-resourced and far too often services go down for long periods of time and people are disadvantaged. As the member for Kennedy said, ultimately this could potentially be critical for someone. It could be a life and death matter. It is certainly the case that across the Northern Territory, and across other parts of remote Australia as well, people are at risk because of their lack of access to telecommunication services.

You cannot, and I do not, lay any blame at the feet of Telstra Country Wide staff in the Top End—none at all, quite the opposite. Danny Honan and his crew and the technicians and staff who look after Telstra Country Wide in the Top End do a stupendous job. They try and do what they can to fix the faults as they arise, and they have very innovative thoughts about how to deliver new communications, but they are compelled by dint of the responsibilities they are given by the Telstra board—a matter which I have raised here previously. They work within a budgetary framework which is insufficient to meet the demand for their services. That is the bottom line, and you are expecting us to believe that somehow or another this future-proofing exercise will guarantee that people who live in the bush will have the same standard of service as other Australians. You propose to review it every five years with no compulsion upon the government to put in place some process to establish that things are below par if they come up with some assessment during the five-year period. You are going to go back to government at budget time and the government are going to say, ‘We will be happy to give you $100 million, $200 million, $300 million or half a billion—whatever it is going to cost.’

Just think how rapidly technology has been changing. New technologies are emerging all the time. We know what will happen if we pursue this course of the full sale of Telstra: if you live in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra or the major metropolitan areas, or even along the eastern seaboard up to Townsville and no doubt in the member for Hinkler’s electorate, you will be okay. You will be fine. But if you live in an isolated community like the member for Kennedy’s electorate or, dare I say, the member for Parkes’ electorate or my electorate or the member for Grey’s electorate or the member for Kalgoorlie’s electorate, forget it. Just take a deep breath and say, ‘Um.’ You will have better luck transmitting a message to the wider world doing that than you will through the new telecommunications infrastructure, because it will not be there. And whose responsibility will that be? It will be the National Party’s responsibility for rolling over to the government on the full sale of Telstra. The absurdity of these future-proofing arrangements! You cannot be serious. You want us—that is, the Australian community—to believe that, through a process yet to really be defined, you are going to come up and review telecommunications and make sure everyone has access. No-one is fooled and no-one believes you.

The member for Kennedy talked about universal service obligations. It is worth looking at recommendation 5 of the Page report:

Recommendation 6 states:

Do you think you will have that done before July? I do not think so. You cannot be serious.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Baldwin)—I remind the member for Lingiari to address his remarks through the chair.

Mr SNOWDON —It is a general remark not made to a particular ‘you’. I can make the remark generally and I am. You cannot have us believe that you are deadly serious about this process. As a collective group—as a bunch of people sitting together in the party room—the Deputy Prime Minister trots in and says: ‘I’ve got bad news for you, fellas. We’re rolling over yet again.’ What do you say to him? You say: ‘Okay, John. Whatever you say, leader. We’ll do that for you. It’s in the good of the country. Bad luck for our constituents. Bad luck for people who live in remote Australia. They can just forget it.’ Future proofing!

I think the coalition ought to start thinking about future proofing their own electorates. We are going to have a process put in place under this piece of legislation where a body will be established—that is, the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee—and the qualifications for membership of that committee will be that they must have a knowledge of or experience in matters affecting regional Australia and/or telecommunications—that is, they will be National Party members. The chair and the majority of members of the committee must not be officers of Telstra—that is good—a Telstra subsidiary or certain officers of the Commonwealth. What about Optus or any other telecommunications carrier? That is okay, is it?

Members are appointed by written instrument for a specified term. By whom? Of course, the minister. So what do we have here? A group of sympathetic National Party flunkeys advising the government as part of the so-called independent review committee. You think that is going to wash, do you? It is not some independent statutory body. No way, Jose. It will be a hand-picked team of flunkeys to give the government what it wants.

The Australian community expect better of this government, and I know that people in remote Australia, certainly in my electorate, are not going to be fooled by it. I cannot imagine how any National Party member, or Liberal member for that matter, who comes from a regional seat could accept that somehow or another this will be grabbed with glee by the electorate. Of course there is the other side of it. It might be that this little exercise sets up another little rort. It will be a situation of: ‘We’ve got to address a problem over here. What’ll we do? We’ll just pump some money into it. It won’t matter whether or not it is judged on the basis of need. We have a loud voice—the member of Parkes—who’s got a problem with telecommunications infrastructure. Pour the dough in. What does it mean about universal service standards? Oh, there won’t be any! Why won’t there be any? Because they’re not all National Party electorates.’ If you happen to be sitting in my seat—the member for Lingiari, a Labor member of parliament—the attitude will be: ‘Oh, don’t touch his electorate. Can’t have telecommunications in his electorate.’ This is the new regime. How hideous. The RTIRC is to conduct reviews on the adequacy of telecommunications services in regional Australia.

Mr John Cobb interjecting—

Ms King interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The member deserves to be heard in silence.

Mr SNOWDON —I am happy that they keep talking.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —I am not, member for Lingiari.

Mr SNOWDON —Again, you must think we are all fools. I guess it is a judgment you have to make, but I know that the people in my electorate are not fools. They show great sense and are greatly aware of what they should be having access to. When we hear the National Party talking about these issues, they are talking about the people who live on the land, the pastoralists and those in the small towns.

In my electorate—and this is another aspect of this issue—there are 250-odd people who own pastoral leases. Those leases might be for large companies. They might be big leases or small leases. They might be for working in the agricultural sector. Those leases are for big areas of land in comparison to elsewhere in Australia. But, by and large, if you live in the bush in the Northern Territory, you are black and you live in a remote community, where there is undercapitalisation and the infrastructure is poor. You do not have access to proper services in education, health or housing, and certainly not in the area of telecommunications, as other Australians do. We are not seeing sufficient attention paid to this issue by members of the National Party or, indeed, the government generally. Frankly, I do not expect the Prime Minister or his Liberal Party colleagues in the ministry to have regard for it, because they never have shown any in the past. Why should they change their attitude?

We know that some measures in this bill came about as a result of recommendations 8 and 9 of the Estens report. You will recall the Estens inquiry; it was another case of a hand-picked mate. A bloke from the National Party was asked to go around Australia and inquire into telecommunications. He did not come to Lingiari. He did not come to the Northern Territory. So how would he know about that area? The reply is: it is all based on written submissions. Well, as I have just pointed out, a large proportion, the predominant proportion, of people who live in the remote communities of my electorate are Indigenous Australians. I doubt whether they ever knew that the Estens inquiry was on. Certainly the inquiry team made no effort to engage with that community. I am concerned, therefore, that we have a piece of legislation based on an inquiry which was itself flawed, and now the recommendations of that flawed inquiry are being further watered down by this government.

What I have noted very clearly from the Page research, requested by the National Party, is that they are not fooled by it. Even though Estens is one of their own, they are not fooled by it. They have made some pretty significant recommendations in relation to how this legislation should be seen. The problem is that it is going to fall on deaf ears, because here we are debating this legislation in the parliament. Has the National Party party room sat down and contemplated the recommendations of the Page committee? Has the coalition party room contemplated the recommendations of the Page committee? It seems to me that there is an obligation on people who develop and make public policy in this country and who pass legislation like this is to ensure that the Australian community is fully informed and is engaged in discussion, dialogue and debate.

There has been no discussion, dialogue or debate about this sort of rubbish in my electorate, apart from the survey which I undertook to establish regarding whether or not people in the electorate were satisfied with their telecommunications. The survey that I undertook received responses from 700 constituents—90 per cent supported keeping Telstra in majority government ownership; 75 per cent believed prices in the bush would increase if Telstra were sold. I have not yet touched on the issue of competition. Unfortunately, time runs out. There is no competition in telecommunications in the bush. There is a dominant provider, a monopoly provider and a good provider when it works—Telstra. (Time expired)