Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025

Mr VENNING (Grey) (18:44): I wish to contribute to the debate on the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. I want to focus on regional telecommunications. Of course, the electorate of Grey represents 92.4 per cent of geographic South Australia, from the Nullarbor to the Eyre Peninsula, the Yorke Peninsula, the mid-north, the far north and, of course, the outback.

So telecommunications are of enormous importance for the people of Grey. Now, we've gone through a few generations of telecommunications. We used to have the copper network, and this was fax and dial-up, and that revolutionised regional communications.

Times have changed, and the reliance on that network is no longer required, but of course we still have the universal service obligation on a service which is not being used. On our farm, for example, the tractor hit the copper cable. It's no longer needed, but we weren't using it in the first place.

Then we had the mobile network. It started off with, I assume, 1G and 2G. Then it went to 3G, 4G and 5G.

As the Gs went up, the less distance the network could travel but the faster the transfer speeds were. Mr Hill: We're about to get 6G! Mr VENNING: Well, I'm not sure if we're about to get 6G!

But, in regional South Australia, of course—5G does not work in regional Australia, because the distances it can travel are quite short. The other way that regional individuals communicate is through the satellite system. The NBN made satellites available to a lot of customers, but these are satellites that travel in the outer atmosphere, at great distances, so the speeds at which you could communicate were poor, and that didn't really revolutionise the connections in regional Australia.

NBN fixed wireless did revolutionise regional telecommunications. These are towers that were put up in communities of between 100 and 1,000 people and had a range of about 14 kilometres. That certainly did revolutionise regional telecommunication.

But I want to stress that there are plenty of communities in Grey that still do not have the NBN. It is 2025. The district council of Elliston on the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula still does not have access to the NBN, so community members there either don't have connectivity or are using the old Telstra ADSL services.

In 2025, that is not acceptable. Now, in 2025, the private sector has got involved and we have LEOs, low-Earth-orbit satellites. Thanks to Elon Musk and Starlink, these have revolutionised regional connectivity.

The technology in our iPhones today has the ability to talk with these LEOs, and that will be turned on throughout the coming months. That's why I thought it was a bit disingenuous when, at the last election, the Labor government came out with a policy to say, 'We will be supporting connectivity for all of Australia.' This was a nothing announcement because this was happening anyway They weren't doing anything to support the connectivity of LEOs.

Of course, their announcement didn't talk about Elon Musk or Starlink at all, but that was the technology that they were leveraging. What that also means is that providers like Telstra and Optus are in what I call a cost-out environment. They do not want to invest more towers into regional Australia, because they know the market share will get swallowed up by LEOs.

That's what we're seeing particularly in my electorate of Grey. There continue to be no more mobile phone towers going up in Grey. I also argue that the Labor government is part of that.

My predecessor, Rowan Ramsey, in his tenure got 56 mobile phone towers put up in the electorate of Grey. In the previous Labor term, not one new tower was put up. There were two promised, but still these two have not been built.

Last week were the Yorke Peninsula Field Days, and of course Telstra had a stand there. I talked about this fact with them, and they agreed. Another concern that we talked about was the degradation of services when 3G was switched off.

As regional communities, we were promised that there would be no degradation of service when 3G was to be shut down. That's clearly not been the case. I drive thousands of kilometres every week.

I know exactly where the dead spots are and can tell you that the service has been degraded. With LEOs, there is a huge opportunity for Australia to get a hold of this market. We are launching low-Earth-orbit satellites into the atmosphere regularly.

We have a retrieval site in the electorate of Grey because of our vast spaces of uninhabited land. It's perfect for retrieving satellites. We are currently launching satellites at Koonibba.

That happens every week. We have a new satellite launch site at Whalers Way for sun-synchronous launches. These are satellites that go polar to polar, not around the equator.

We are launching more each week, and there is a huge opportunity, a multibillion-dollar industry, that we need to take hold of here in Australia. Space is a regional industry. We are launching satellites from the regions, we are retrieving them from the regions and now we need to manufacture them in the regions as well.

The last thing I will talk about is the issue of power outages and their effect on telecommunications. Earlier in the year we had a power outage for about 20 hours on the Yorke Peninsula. The whole peninsula was out of power.

The towers have batteries on them, but they only last for a couple of hours. By the time we got to 10 o'clock in the morning, no-one in Yorke Peninsula could communicate. That has impacts on emergency services.

That has impacts on business, and it was a weekend, so business shut down for that day. ElectroNet at the time considered that not to be something they would pay out. If you were a butcher and you lost all of your produce, you didn't get paid out for that power outage.

Some exciting developments that are happening include the ability for councils and other community members to get a generator and plug it into these mobile phone towers when there are power outages. We realise, with this all-in-one-basket, wind-and-solar approach to our energy market, our grid is becoming less and less stable. The degradation of our telecommunication network is getting worse as well.

So we need to start thinking about these initiatives to support the telecommunications in the regions. I'll leave it there, but I'll finish by saying that we will be supporting this bill without amendment. Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.