This is a brief submission to the Senate Committee Inquiry into the Australian Communications Network.

Background

The Break O'Day local government area covers around 3,800 square kilometres on Tasmania's north-east coast, with a permanent population of around 5,700 residents. Our municipal centre is the township of St Helens, which has a permanent population of around 2,000 people.

Our principal industries include tourism, agriculture (sheep, beef, dairying, cropping) coal, aquaculture, and fishing. Our nearest major service centre is the City of Launceston, a two hour vehicle drive along narrow winding roads.

Like most remote rural areas, Break O'Day suffers from a lack of many basic services, such as dental, respite care, other health facilities for the aged, youth facilities  etc. While we have the second highest youth unemployment figure in this state, our demographic is centered towards a more elderly population, with one of the State's highest percentage of retirees.

Economic Development Challenges

Break O'Day Council faces significant challenges in attracting industry to the area and stopping 'population drift', wit many of our young people leaving the area for larger urban centres for employment opportunities.

Recently, Council undertook a major initiative in advertising nationally that it was prepared to virtually 'give away' an its Council Chambers in Fingal. This building became obsolete during 1993 Council amalgamations, and was a substantial building in size and only around 25 years old.

The only conditions surrounding this 'giveaway' was that whoever took the building over needed to create a certain number of new job positions in the town for a certain period of time.

This generated enormous interest, and we immediately received genuine responses from 2 interested parties who were keen to set up call centre-type operations, and thought the business ideally suited.

Unfortunately, after further examination, it was found that the existing telephone network was old and unsuitable for their operations, forcing them back to major centres in Hobart/Launceston. We appreciate that Telstra is now answerable to private shareholders, and will wish to extract as much value from their older copper networks as possible. The downside is that the service we receive is grossly inferior to our city counterparts. In our example, Council was prepared to virtually donate a $500,000 community asset to kick-start employment in a small country town. Poor telecommunication infrastructure was clearly the major contributing factor in this community being unable to secure new and long term employment opportunities in this instance .

Other anecdotal evidence experienced by this Council:-

• Telstra service calls take an average of 2 weeks. Is this the same delay as experienced in urban areas?
  
• Whilst Telstra advertise the benefits of their national broadband service, it is only available to our region via satellite (i.e. you must have your own satellite dish installed). This is an extremely expensive option as far as initial set-up costs go, and I cannot recall any local businesses or industry within our municipality who has purchased this expensive service. Again, we cannot get cheaper land-line broadband as our network is not fibre-optic but the old copper line network, incapable of transmitting at the speed and volume required for the broadband service.  Again, what chance do we have of attracting new e-businesses away from urban areas if we cannot provide the same infrastructure?
  
• Regarding the mobile telephone network, SMS messaging can be delayed by up to 24 hours. We understand that urban areas have almost immediate delivery of SMS messages. This has very real repercussions on our Council, as it directly impacts on our early-warning electronic sewerage system (Telemetry system). This system normally operates via SMS messaging, however we have had to install an override (on of our staff is phoned directly at home) as we cannot rely on the delivery of late messages over the Telstra network.
  

Service Standards

I have been General Manager of this Council for less than 2 years, but in that short time I have been surprised by the generally poor  standards of service and follow up from Telstra to this area compared with Hobart. It was interesting to hear Treasurer Costello on the news this morning (17/7) saying that a recent customer satisfaction survey showed that Telstra services are held in high regard. I cannot remember any such survey being undertaken in our community! I know the views within this submission are shared by most business and community bodies within our rural/remote region.

We would strongly urge the Senate Committee to recommend that any further privatisation of Telstra by delayed until services to remote and rural Australia are demonstrably improved.

This Council has tried to be innovative and proactive in attempting to lure new jobs and industries to our region, but we are effectively 'hamstrung' by existing poor service and infrastructure, something we cannot see improving without direct Government intervention.

David Morcom
General Manager
Break O'Day Council
Ph      63 761 281
Fax     63 761 551

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