Senator LUNDY (1:42 PM) —In Sleepers, Wake! , the Hon. Barry Jones, MP, a former Labor minister for science and technology, wrote that capital, land and labour, the three factors of production, have been joined by a fourth: knowledge. Information and knowledge are the empowering tools of today's society but, as my colleague puts it: is this information a free good? If so, what levels of responsibility should government take in providing an accessible information superhighway as opposed to a tollway? As knowledge and information are integral factors in production, control over the carriers of information becomes increasingly paramount to our future. If information is a right, then access to the information highway should be freely available and affordable to everybody.

By contrast, there are those, like this government, that believe information is a private or commercial commodity that should be sold or licensed. Whilst there are sectors that can legitimately apply an added value in the transmission, it can be said that what we are dealing with here is something that is a resource to this country as opposed to a consumer commodity. By ceding control to the corporate sector the government is, in effect, selling off one of the means by which all Australians can enter and participate in the electronic society.

Fair and equitable participation in this new paradigm of communications and information sharing is something that Labor holds true to its philosophies and principles, but something that remains very distant from the philosophies being espoused by the government. As the Howard government begins the process of selling off the remaining two-thirds of Telstra, it is fundamentally important that we assess information technologies not only to find out where they are taking us but also to analyse who is being left behind.

One of the largest groups marginalised in the IT revolution and changes to the information and communication paradigm are rural and remote Australians. If you live off the main road then you are literally out of sight and out of mind of this government. Likewise, the information superhighway is bypassing anyone not connected to the main road. Rural people know only too well what it is to be forgotten. The decline in rural banking services is just one example. One in three major bank branches in rural areas closed between 1993 and 1996, rendering 600 rural communities without access to proper financial institutions.

Rural residents do not have the same access to support structures that metropolitan citizens enjoy. They must survive without the networks that underpin city life. If you live on a remote or distant property you do not have the same sort of access to support or help to manage your computer's file management problem or if your hard drive crashes. There generally are no local training courses, localised help desks or even computer stores that can offer sales and post-purchase service that the rest of us can access quite freely.

Unfortunately, it is not just rural residents who are unable to ride the superhighway. Older Australians, Australians with a socioeconomic disadvantage and, in particular, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are in a similar boat. Statistically, we know, as a result of an ABS survey late last year, that these factors are significant in explaining the inequities to access to the new information technologies. About 60 per cent of Australians on rural and remote settlements are Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, and their telecommunication needs are not being addressed.

I recently came across a report that reaffirmed that rural Australians need a world-class telephone system. But they also need world-class television, radio, fax and e-mail services and a quality postal service just to remain a part of society, to have current and relevant connections with society. I know many rural people will laugh at this, but many of them are struggling because they are still struggling just to have a standard telecommunications or telephone service. E-mail and the Internet are pipedreams at the moment. Yet the Internet and enhanced information services can deliver essential information about their primary industry, the weather reports, legal services, the stock market and new product and marketing opportunities.

With the recent developments in electronic commerce, being on-line means overcoming the lack of commercial and retail services that rural communities and small towns cannot offer. This in turn introduces a whole range of social challenges and regional economic issues that will have to be confronted. To ignore the ramifications of some of these changes in this context is certainly at the government's peril. The principle goal of any government should be to ensure that rural consumers and rural citizens have the same telecommunications and information services as city residents.

One of the more interesting developments in this area is the current pricing regimes between the carriers providing Internet services to rural areas compared to metropolitan areas. I watched with interest the pricing disadvantage that currently exists between the two groups in this country, and relate it back to how those rural people are, on the one hand, being encouraged quite stridently by government to participate in this new on-line revolution but, at the same time, the government is choosing to ignore the means that they have at their fingertips to ensure price equity and access equity to the services.

We often hear too from this government about its commitment to small business. The recent electronic commerce summit here in Canberra highlighted access issues for small business, particularly those in rural and regional areas. The pricing inequities that currently exist between the two metropolitan areas and the rural areas show that Telstra at that time provided a significant disadvantage to rural consumers. I note with interest in yesterday's Australian that Telstra's Internet product, Big Pond, has joined the rush to provide flat rate Internet access. This is quite an intriguing development, given that the major carriers and certainly the major providers of ISPs moved away from flat rate Internet access quite early on in the development of that market on the basis that industry analysts and their own economics in providing that service demonstrated that that was unviable in the long term.

So what do we see now? We see, once again, competition perhaps playing a role in the provision of these flat rate services, given that another provider of Internet services, OzEmail, instituted the same regime just recently. What we have in two major metropolitan areas is a response from Telstra to a move by OzEmail to instigate, once again, a flat rate Internet access pricing package. What we do not see is a rural centre being offered the same service or the same pricing regime. What we do not see are those non-competitive areas in this country getting offered a cut-price or discount regime or access to the Internet.

What we do see are the metropolitan areas that are well serviced, that have a profit margin that is worth it for these private companies to actually pursue market share and to extract a profit from, being the sole beneficiaries of the competitive pressures that are existing. What is happening is that rural and remote Australians do not even get subjected to the competitive pressures that could lower the costs that are currently being imposed on them for Internet access.

I also note with interest media speculation on this specific area, where it talks about the contemplation by the government of enhancing the regulatory regime to actually ensure that somehow the services are maintained to rural and remote Australia. This comes back to quite a powerful contradiction that is underpinning or, I suppose, upstaging to a large degree the government's whole rhetoric about their move to full privatisation of the carrier Telstra.

The government cannot guarantee the delivery of adequate services, either on the Internet or even in telecommunications generally, to rural and regional Australia without enhancing the regulatory framework to enforce it. Why? Competitive pressures do not exist where there is no profit to be made out of a given market. Because Australia is such a big place, there are several areas in this country which will never make money on behalf of a carrier, an Internet service provider or anybody else.

How will the government put pressure on the various Internet service providers, for example, to lower their costs for those regional subscribers? How will they ensure that OzEmail, Big Pond or regional ISPs actually want to compete in rural and remote communities? The fundamental flaw in the government's plan is that that will not happen. The only way it can deliver a base level of service is to regulate and to provide for compliance measures and, hopefully, penalties that will stick.

To go back to the earlier points I made about inequities between rural communities and metropolitan communities, and the value of knowledge and information in our society: we have a grave situation emerging where the information poor and the information rich will be divided, not just along socioeconomic lines, but along geographical lines as well. At a time when we on this side of the chamber are so mindful of these widening disparities, these social inequities, we have a government that consistently ignores the structural ramifications of its policies in relation to privatisation and to playing with the regulatory structures in regard to competition policy.

All of these arguments lead to a fairly straightforward message. The existence of information rich and information poor, and the widening gap between the two, is not an argument in itself against the privatisation of public assets. But the implications of that policy extend far beyond economic considerations and public and private revenues. They extend far beyond a comparative benefit to shareholders or potential shareholders, and the public interest. What they go to is how we will cohesively, as a society, progress and develop—how we will cohesively take advantage of the information revolution, this new paradigm that we are already embracing but that many Australians have no opportunity to participate in.

To deal with these issues in isolation is to deliver the largest proportion of Australians to exclusion from these developments and changes. This, obviously, is an act of gross negligence on the part of this government. We have seen so many examples of efforts on their part to demonstrate to the Australian community that in some way they have tapped into the information revolution.

We saw a very belated establishment of the National Office of Information Economy. It is now struggling to play catch-up with critical issues that have been affecting other economies in other countries for a number of years. We see a conference on electronic commerce come over two years into the government's term. Was it preceded by a conference on the social implications of this information revolution? Was it preceded by a conference on just what it meant to be excluded from the information revolution? No, straight to the business aspect, straight to the economic angle.

Unless this government puts people first in its consideration of information technology matters, these inequities will only increase. It is an imperative. (Time expired)

Sitting suspended from 1.57 p.m. to 2.00 p.m.