Yorke Peninsula Power Outage

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (15:16): I am up again to talk about the electorate-wide blackout that we experienced on the Yorke Peninsula on Friday 14 March. Members might be sick of it: I have been up during every single sitting week since that blackout occurred. I am calling for action from government to compensate businesses that lost money from that blackout through the loss of the opportunity to trade, through stock that wasted or through a variety of other adverse effects that arose as a result of that electorate-wide blackout.

There is another issue that I want to raise, and it is not because it is a secondary issue that is not as important. It is just through virtue of the lack of opportunity that I have had that it has had to wait a few weeks. This other issue is of critical importance to our electorate, that being the fact that within a few hours of the blackout occurring we lost all phone reception across the entire Yorke Peninsula. It was a truly dangerous situation to put the residents of our electorate in, and it was one that could have had literally life-or-death consequences.

It seems that the batteries that offer a backup plan for our phone towers only last a few hours. So the power went out in the morning, and by lunchtime across the entire electorate we had no phone service for anyone to use, and we could not make contact with loved ones to check in on them.

It is not an exaggeration to say this is life or death. This is a seriously dangerous situation we put our residents in. Imagine if you had an elderly neighbour or relative who lives some way away, who you were worried about on a hot day—because it was a hot day—and you wanted to check on them. Well, you could not. You could not call them. You had to get out there and go and see them, and if they were not approachable or easy to get to then there was just no way to check in.

What if you wanted to rely on the device that they wore around their neck that would set off an alarm in the case of emergency? Well, those operate on a 3G network, and they would not have worked either. There would have been people who had paid good money for these devices to sound an alarm in case of emergency, and those alarms would not have worked because the phone towers were out and those services were unavailable. So there is another cross; that would not have worked.

What if a bushfire had started? It was a hot day. It was a windy day. It was an extremely hot day, actually, from memory, and what if a bushfire had started and begun rollicking across our electorate? My understanding is that CFS volunteers in this day and age rely on their phones to receive a notification on their app to get a call to the station so they can go out and fight a fire. Well, those notifications would not have come through, because there was no phone service across the entire peninsula. So if a bushfire had started, if there was an ambulance call-out that was required, if there was a police incident that occurred, none of those emergency services would have been able to get the notification to respond to those incidents. This is a terribly dangerous situation and something that we as a parliament and telco providers need to investigate doing better.

It extends to more than emergency services and health situations. We have with us today guests from different schools across the peninsula who were dropped off, in large part, at school on that Friday morning because parents did not know at that point that there was going to be a 20-hour outage and who by lunchtime were unable to contact their parents to arrange a pick up or, if there was an incident that occurred at school, to arrange for their parents to come and get them.

That is an incredible situation that left teachers and schools in a really unenviable position of trying to organise something with parents and teachers that was just not possible to do. I was talking to some of the teachers whilst we were up here doing tours just before, who outlined some of the stories that they had to deal with on that outage day.

This is a situation that we need to combat. I have written to Telstra and outlined my concerns and had a response and I have brought it up now in this chamber, but it is something that we need to investigate. I strongly believe that there needs to be an allocation of community batteries and/or generators across the state at key points so that we can access some service if we need it. It might not be that we can power every phone tower across my electorate in the event of a blackout, but surely we can ensure that there are some that are working so people can drive to and check in on people when they need to. As I have said, without exaggeration it is a matter of life and death.

I will be taking that up. I will be continuing to pursue that, just like I am for compensation for businesses that have lost out as a result of this outage and just like I am for the general upgrade and repair of our phone towers. I am very pleased to confirm to this house that we have a new tower incoming at Port Rickaby. It has been some years since that funding was promised, and it could not come quickly enough.

I have to report that over the new year, a gentleman was unfortunate enough to pass away at the Port Rickaby Caravan Park in December. Such is the ineptitude of that phone tower that currently exists there, the emergency services who responded to that caravan park had to huddle around a payphone to talk to their superiors at different places because the mobile phones were not working to call out. We had this extraordinary situation where ambulance officers and police officers were taking turns to use a payphone to report the difficulties they had in retrieving a deceased person from a caravan park. It is well overdue that that new phone tower is built, and it will be well welcomed by that community.