The
Secretary, Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the
Arts Legislation Committee, Parliament House
Please
accept my brief remarks as a submission to the Committees inquiry into
government proposals for the full sale of Telstra.
We
live near Candelo in the Bega Valley Shire, which is
in the federal electorate of Eden-Monaro.
I
oppose the full sale, as I have the partial sale so far, for the principal
reason that once sold, there will be no reliable mechanism by which Telstra will
be made accountable for the delivery of telecommunication services of equivalent
standard to those available in the capital cities. The proposal to sell Telstra
constitutes an anti-nation-building policy by which rural economies will be
further marginalized.
Despite
all Telstras claims to the contrary, telecommunication services here are
terrible.
Mobile
phone coverage is woeful, there are frequent unexplained interruptions to
landline services and internet connection speeds are so slow as to render the
internet a total waste of time and money for many people in the district. For
others, the connection speed obtained from one connection to the next is as good
as a lottery. Even during a single session, speeds fluctuate wildly between the
barely acceptable and the hopelessly inadequate.
The
governments proposal to fund additional capital expenditure by Telstra is a
drop in the bucket compared to what is actually needed and represents a tiny
proportional increase in Telstras capital program. The governments response to
the Estens Inquiry is in my view a white wash. I made
a submission to that Inquiry and nothing the government has proposed since would
address in any meaningful way the problems with Telstra in the area that I
outlined. The problems I raised in the submission will continue and probably get
worse if Telstra is sold off completely.
Despite
the laying of new cable up our road in March this year to supposedly cope with
demand for new services, that capacity is already fully utilized as our new
neighbours discovered when they applied for their
place to be connected. Telstra has again had to resort to line splitting and the
use of the bane of our lives, pair gains, to connect them.
Due
to the use by Telstra of myriad contractors to perform even the most basic
trenching, cabling and jointing work, no-one associated with one part of the job
or another has a clue what the other contractors are doing. When our neighbours phone was connected, the contractor doing the
trenching would have almost certainly severed the cables from the exchange and
the one into our property had we not been on hand to locate them for
him.
Our
MP, Gary Nairn has told me in a letter that all these
issues are commercial decisions for Telstra. The sad thing is that the way the
government sees it, he is probably right. If providing a decent service to rural
subscribers is to be determined on a strictly commercial basis, then we are most
likely doomed to a service that is sub-standard. If on the other hand, there is
room for our elected representatives to make representations on our behalf to
Telstra, which is after all a monopoly when it comes to capital works in areas
like ours, then at least we might have a chance. In the end it would come down
to the quality of our MP, which is something we have the power to change at the
ballot box.
If
any sale is to proceed, Telstra should be broken up, its commercial operations
floated off and the network should remain in government hands as a publicly
owned monopoly so as to ensure that Telstras network can play a real role in
Australian nation-building.
Phil
Morgans
Candelo
NSW 2550