MEDIA RELEASE THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER AND MINISTER FOR TRADE

31 December 1997

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1998: A NEW ERA FOR REGIONAL AUSTRALIA

HI-TECH, INTERNET TO HELP THE BUSH

1998 will usher in a "new age" of communications and convenience for regional and remote Australia, the Deputy Prime Minister and National Party Leader, Tim Fischer, predicted to day in a New Year message.

"For the first time in nearly a century technology has moved in favour of small towns and remote populations," Mr Fischer said. "The last time this happened was at the dawning of the era of rail, when railway lines opened up huge tracts of inland Australia.

"This time it will be the phone line, not the rail line, that changes regional Australia.

"It is about people like Mick Denigan - the stock whip maker in the remote heart of the Northern Territory who sells his Mick's Whips to the world via the internet."

Mr Fischer said the key to the new age of regional Australia was a massive expansion of communications services to regional Australia which will start to flow in 1998 from the Federal Government's Networking the Nation program - a $250 million regional telecommunications infrastructure fund.

"Networking the Nation is unashamedly positive discrimination in favour of regional Australia," he said. "But it is enormously important to the country because it attacks directly the real 'tyranny of distance' in Australia - the lack of communications services in remote areas.

"Its aim is to put regional businesses, regional students, and regional lifestyles, on a par with their city counterparts when it comes to communicating with each other and the world. It is technology which will keep people in regional Australia, and attract people back to regional Australia, and by doing that could literally be a life-line for many small country towns."

Mr Fischer said this was the sort of service to country Australia that former NP leader Sir John McEwen would have loved to have been able to deliver.

"I also hope that it gains the approval of pro-interventionist commentators of the ilk of Bob Santamaria and Peter Robinson," Mr Fischer added.

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