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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-07-02 Daily Xml
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Mr PENGILLY (Finniss) (15:30): I would like today to welcome yesterday's announcement by the federal government of the rollout on the 'backhaul blackspot program', and the fact that Victor Harbor has been chosen as the spot for this in South Australia, along with a number of other locations around Australia: Emerald and Longreach in Queensland; Geraldton, Western Australia; Darwin; Broken Hill; and South-West Gippsland. This is a step in the right direction, and I welcome it as I am sure will the residents of my electorate.

I pay full credit to Mr Roy Ramage, particularly, the Economic Development Officer of the Victor Harbor council who has worked and pushed and shoved at this, along with a couple of people from the Fleurieu Regional Development Board for a fair while. I am intensely interested in how this will roll out, and I hope that it will benefit the residents of Victor Harbor and increase markedly the amount of broadband coverage and broadband connection they will have in terms of their ability to communicate with the rest of Australia.

It is also important to recognise that Telstra already has this cable in hand. In fact, it owns the cable that is in there, and this backhaul will be put in place as a supplement to that. It is important to note that Telstra actually has its cable paid for, and I want to know (and I will do more work on this) whether individual residents in Victor Harbor will be connected to this or whether they will have to apply and pay considerable amounts of money to get onto it. While I sincerely welcome it, this is only the first step. What we have to do now is to get a network provider to come in and hook up to this form of communication so that it can improve the lot of Victor Harbor residents.

I point out that it has to be viable for another provider to come in to do this, and that will be a challenge in itself. I will make a few discreet inquiries on where we go with that. Yes, it is welcome. We do not want to get too excited. We need to find out what the cost to consumers will be, because that is an important issue. We need to find out what providers will be interested in getting in on this backhaul, this extension, and, if we can, we also need to make sure that these services will be cheaper for consumers.

While the federal government's announcement is a good thing for the area of Victor Harbor, we have got a bit of work to do in my view before it comes to fruition. I understand also that it will take about eight years for this to roll out across the nation, so I am pleased that Victor Harbor was chosen in the first round. I think that is a good thing. Unfortunately, we need to remember that the Rudd government cancelled the OPAL network, which was targeted for completion this year and which would have seen new fibre backhaul rolled into service areas of every state and country, with a 30 per cent discount in current backhaul pricing across the 15,000 kilometre network.

Governments come and governments go, and blessed be the name of the government, but we are one step backwards from where we were, from where we should have been, in my view. However, this will work to the benefit of Victor Harbor in the long term. I look forward to further announcements for other towns, cities and regional places across South Australia. I think this is just the start. The backhaul will assist the communication through to the major centre in Adelaide and it will be a step towards improving broadband services. I think there is a lot more to come out of it, and I hope that before too long I can find out more information and report positively to the house.

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