Prosser Richard: Telecommunications (Development Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeProsser Richard: Telecommunications (Development Levy) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 21 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3743. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RICHARD PROSSER (NZ First): I was not sure whether I was going to take a call on this when I came down here but listening to the debate I feel that I cannot not take one. I do want to talk about the title. I think the two words that really matter most are “telecommunications” and “development”. Frankly I do not care whether we call this thing a levy or a tax or a koha or a Danegeld or anything else; what matters is that it is money that gets paid.I agree absolutely with Minister Adams that it should be the telecommunications companies that pay it because it is actually the companies who since privatisation are responsible for the fact that we have not had development in telecommunications in the rural areas.I am going to put this from a slightly different perspective from some of my Labour colleagues because I actually live in the boondocks. I live in a cellphone blackspot—it is called rural New Zealand. There is no coverage. I have got maybe one little sweet spot up by my garage where I can get two bars if I hold the phone up there—sometimes on a good day if it is not raining. But in the house? No chance. This is 40 minutes north of downtown Christchurch so it is hardly the middle of nowhere.We moved up to Canterbury about 6 years from Central Otago. The previous 2 years we had been enjoying blisteringly fast broadband speeds of about 2 megabits and that was because they had upgraded the cabinet round the corner finally but prior to that we were on dial-up. If you wanted to look at a picture you just sort of set the thing going and then went to bed and in the morning your 14 kilobyte photo had come through—if you were lucky if the thing had not logged off through the night.Going back a little bit further in time when I was growing up I remember the telephone was a black Bakelite thing on the wall with a crank handle. To use it you would pick up the handle crank the handle and the nice lady on the other end would say “Number please?” and so you would say whom you wanted to talk to. Being a little boy at the time of course the nice lady in the phone exchange was in the post office and she could see the town. She knew everybody and she knew whom I was probably talking about. She would say “Do you want to talk to Paul?” and I would say yes and she would say “I’ve just seen him go out.” And that was the way that rural New Zealand was. Actually in broadband terms most of rural New Zealand is still like that. Most of rural New Zealand would just like to have broadband.So in 2009 we moved to Canterbury and Telecom said yes that was fine it could hook us up to broadband it had checked our lines and they were all fine. It sent us a nice free modem and that was all going to be good. And then Telecom came to hook it up and said actually no our line could not take it. We asked when that was going to happen and Telecom said it was looking at upgrading the exchange—maybe in about 2012. We asked what we were going to do until then. A couple of the Labour members mentioned companies like Farmside. In those days that was pretty much one of the only alternatives. It was doing mostly satellite internet in those days. So we looked into that and we looked into radio and ended up getting a radio link with a company out of Christchurch. We were on the outer edge of where it could reach. It was slightly cheaper and slightly faster than the terribly slow speeds that that satellite was offering.I think it is a bit rich that we have got members—and they are mostly Labour members—who are standing up here talking about rural this and rural that and provincial this and provincial the other thing. They talk about constituents coming to see them and they relate these second-hand stories about the services that are provided in the provinces kind of holding it out at arms’ length as if it is some sort of distasteful thing—“We’ve heard about the countryside. We see documentaries about it on television from time to time. Every now and then an angry person from rural New Zealand will phone us up and sometimes a scruffy one will come into our office and sing us a tale of woe about how terrible things are. Of course we sit there and smile sweetly and nod and take these concerns on board—at a distant academic level because actually we do not live that.”Well people like me do live it. I understand that maybe the upper levels of the National Party have lost touch with the heartland but there are plenty of members on the Government side who still live in the rural areas who still know. They themselves experience these things. And so I agree with my colleague Tracey Martin that it is a bit odd that here we are doing the Government’s work for it but in actual fact as far as this is concerned we agree with them entirely. I heard Ms Lee talking earlier about the plight of some travel writers I think they were who were having difficulty out in the cellphone blackspot that is called rural New Zealand trying to get a link to their Twitter. These things do not mean anything to urbanites who understand them at an academic level. Of course here we have got connectivity. We have got cellphones that have got lots of bars on them all the time. We can go up to our offices and we have got high-speed broadband. Members can go back to the hotel and they have got broadband. They can go back to their apartment and they have got broadband. They can go home to their urban electorate offices and they have got all of these things. And so they hear this sort of whining noise from people—“Oh the poor people of the country have not got fast broadband.”—and talk in highfalutin conceptual ideas about having another review or perhaps forming a committee and looking at things again.People in the provinces have actually had a gutsful of that. It is the provinces that earn this country’s living. It is the provinces that create the wealth. It is the provinces who are always on the rough end of the stick.