Pauline Hanson, now a member of the Senate’s Joint Standing Committee for the National Broadband Network, has written to Communications Minister Mitch Fifield seeking his support for a 90km fibre optic link to Norfolk Island from the Hawaiki Cable that will link Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Hawaii.
Hanson wrote to Fifield after a recent visit to Norfolk Island where she says she gained an insight into the ”issues and opportunities that currently exist for that community”.
She says the island is seeking Australian government support to connect to an undersea cable passing within 100 km of the island’s existing communications facilities.
“Senator Hanson has requested that Minister Fifield urgently examine how the Australian government could underwrite or provide other support to ensure the Norfolk Island community is not excluded from this cable,” a statement from her office says.
{loadposition peter}Hanson says the cable would provide for the data needs of the island for the next 40 years, and wants the fibre optic cable to be used to carry NBN data to the island, although the current NBN plan will see the island dependent on the NBN’s Sky Muster satellite.
She says the laying of a submarine cable of this scale is “quite infrequent”, and it may be “several decades” before another cable runs as close to the island. “The short distance of this proposed 90km spur allows it to be unpowered, drastically reducing the ongoing costs of operation compared to other options.”
The statement from Hanson notes that a previous consortium of private investors pulled out of their offer to build the spur, which will cost approximately $12 million to lay and connect, “following the political uncertainty caused by the Australian government’s takeover of governance on the island this year”.
According to Hanson, this happened in part because the Australian government “terminated another commercial agreement with the former Norfolk Island Legislative Assembly, that would have allowed the cultivation of medicinal marijuana”.
She says Norfolk Telecom, which was taken over by the Australian government as of 1 July, operates a fibre-to-the-node broadband network on the island, and that the data for this network is transferred via the O3B and TNZI Satellite system.
Hanson says this fibre network, along with a fibre connection to the former Anson Bay Cable Station on the island’s west coast, would allow for an “easy integration with the existing telecommunications infrastructure on the island, and the additional data would also allow the introduction of 3G/4G mobile phone services on the island".