Budget: Rural and Regional Areas

Mr FLETCHER (Bradfield—Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) (15:56): I am very pleased to rise to speak about the member for Hunter's motion this afternoon, the premise of which is that the budget is apparently inflicting pain, we are told, on rural and regional areas.

I thought to myself: 'Communications? Telecommunications serving rural and regional areas is a very important issue of priority.' And I thought to myself, 'Well if this budget is inflicting pain, for example when it comes to the $100 million that the Abbott government has committed to spending on improved mobile coverage in regional and remote Australia, then how does that compare to the amounts of money that the previous Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government spent in its budget each year on regional and rural mobile communications'? I went back and looked at the 2008 budget and there was not one dollar spent on mobile communications by the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government in regional Australia in 2009. So then I turned to the 2010 budget, not one dollar there; 2011, not one dollar there either; 2012-13, not one dollar spent by the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government on improving mobile telecommunications in rural and regional Australia—despite the fact that there is a clear sense when you speak to people in rural and regional Australia that they want to see better mobile communications.

Ms Chesters: They want the NBN!

Mr FLETCHER: I hear somebody from the other side asserting they want the NBN. When you talk to people in regional areas about communications, they say to you a couple of things. They say, 'We really want improved mobile communications', and then they say: 'When is this NBN going to appear? We heard so much about it under the previous government, that it was the universal answer to everything, but what was actually delivered was a long way short of the rhetoric.' And that, I am sorry to say, is the sad story of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government when it came to regional communications.

The fact is the coalition has always had a stronger commitment to improving communications networks in rural and regional Australia as far back as the time, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, when you were instrumental in the $150 million commitment to removing the areas of untimed local calls—a very important reform in regional communications. And there have been so many others. There have been so many programs over so many years that the coalition government has committed to that have helped to improve rural and regional communications. And in this budget there is a commitment to spend $100 million on improving regional and rural mobile communications. So far from this project inflicting pain in the area of regional and rural mobile communications, this budget contains a strong financial commitment by the Abbott government reflecting our determination to see Australians in regional and remote Australia getting improved mobile communication services.

One of the things we are going to do is allocate this money through a well-structured, competitive selection process—competitive as between locations and competitive as between the mobile carriers that will be invited to bid in the competitive selection process. The purpose of that is to make sure that we get the best possible value for taxpayers' money, to ensure that the spending goes to the sites where it can make the biggest difference and do the most good, and to ensure that we leverage the maximum amount of money out of the carriers. We expect a co-contribution and we expect that will get at least as much as the $100 million of public money which is being put in.

Again, this importance in structuring the funding that we are providing to underpin additional services stands in stark contrast to the chaotic mess of the process that the former broadband minister, Senator Conroy, followed with his 2008 tender process, which ultimately collapsed and led in turn to the rushed decision in April 2009 which has created so much difficulty when it comes to the atrocious performance in implementing the previous government's National Broadband Network mess, something we are now busy seeking to clean up.

So when you separate the rhetoric and look at the reality, this government has identified its priorities. When it comes to regional and rural Australia we have heard a very strong message that people want improved mobile coverage for safety reasons—road safety, farm accidents, natural disasters in bushfires and floods; and they want it for economic participation reasons. For all of those reasons the Abbott government is committing significant expenditure in this budget to improve regional and remote mobile communications. That is a budget commitment consistent with serving the people of regional and remote Australia.