Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

To our mate over there, the member for New England, I'm pleased you're contributing to this debate and fulsomely supporting the government's position, which is good to see—not that I agree with it totally. I commend my colleague who's just spoken, the member for Lyons. We all express our support for the continuation beyond the budget fixation of this year, where it was no longer to be seen, and the reversal from the government in making sure that there is some ongoing funding available for this Mobile Black Spot Program.

I want to talk about my communities in the Northern Territory. I think the member for New England said he had seven or 17 places that still had black spots. Well, in my electorate, which is 1.34 million square kilometres, there are 450 of them, amongst the poorest and most remote communities in the country. Many of them just don't have access to mobile phone services, and that's a problem. There are those who were announced for funding as long ago as 2015 and are still waiting for the services to be put in place. I mention the community of Imanpa, which is 300 kays out of Alice Springs. They were announced for base station funding in 2015, and it has just recently come online. Two other communities, Finke and Mount Liebig, one to the south of Alice Springs and one to the north-west of Alice Springs, were both announced for funding in 2015 and are still waiting to have those base stations put in. Last year the residents of Christmas Island were without internet and had limited mobile services while waiting for the installation of the NBN Sky Muster service.

It's very hard to explain to people who live in metropolitan areas the importance of having mobile services in remote locations. When you've got them, you take them for granted. When you haven't got them, you want them and you need them. If you drive up and down the length of the Stuart Highway from the South Australian border—or, indeed, go to Adelaide—to Darwin, there are many spots along that highway where you can't get mobile services. That's important for, obviously, health and safety reasons and road safety in particular.

It's a pity that this is only a five-minute slot, because I want to commend a local response to this program coming out of the Centre for Appropriate Technology, an Aboriginal owned organisation, which has developed what I will call 'listening posts'. These are dishes which are put in strategic locations where, if you drive up to them and take out your mobile phone, you can actually use your mobile phone. This is not part of the Mobile Black Spot Program. This is part of a process of providing connectivity to people who drive long distances to and from remote communities.

I'll give you an example of a community which is located 500 kilometres west of Alice Springs, Kintore. It's currently 300 kilometres from its nearest mobile phone service at Papunya. Think about it: you're driving the road from Papunya to Kintore and something happens. Unless you've got a satellite phone, which most people don't, how are you supposed to make contact? Thankfully, Mount Liebig, which is about 170 kilometres from Kintore, will get mobile phone service in the near future. Can you imagine any other state in Australia where you could be 170 to 300 kilometres away from a mobile service? That would mean in Victoria, if you were 170 kays from Melbourne, the nearest mobile service would be Shepparton. You could imagine how that would not be tolerated.

We have got a huge problem here, and I don't think the government has really come to terms with the depth of the problem or the extent of it and the needs of remote Australians. There is a challenge here for all of us: we've got to appreciate the difficulty for people who live in rural and remote parts of Australia, whether they're in remote communities, on pastoral leases or just travelling through and what this means if you don't get access to mobile phones. As I say, this is an important thing for us all to take note of, and I encourage the government to think far more carefully about the continuation of this program into the future.

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