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CORRECTED VERSION RURAL AND REGIONAL COMMITTEE Inquiry into the opportunities for people to use telecommuting and e-business to work remotely in rural and regional Victoria Horsham — 31 July 2013 Members Mr D. Drum Mr I. Trezise Mr G. Howard Mr P. Weller Mr A. Katos Chair: Mr P. Weller Deputy Chair: Mr G. Howard Staff Executive Officer: Ms L. Topic Research Officer: Mr P. O’Brien Witnesses Cr R. Gersch, mayor, Hindmarsh Shire Council; Ms J. Bourke, executive director, Wimmera Development Association; and Mr R. Campling, chief executive officer, Yarriambiack Shire Council. 31 July 2013 Rural and Regional Committee 1 The CHAIR — Welcome to the public hearing of the Rural and Regional Committee’s inquiry into the opportunities for people to use telecommuting and e-business to work remotely in rural and regional Victoria. I hereby advise that all evidence taken at this hearing is protected by parliamentary privilege as provided under relevant Australian law. I also advise that any comments made outside the hearing may not be afforded such privilege. Can I also, for the benefit of Hansard, ask you to give your name and address? Ms BOURKE — Jo Bourke, 62 Darlot Street, Horsham. Cr GERSCH — Rob Gersch, 4 Leahy Street, Nhill. Mr CAMPLING — Ray Campling, 4001 Borung Highway, Warracknabeal. The CHAIR — Thanks very much. Would you like to give a presentation and have questions at the end or questions as you go? Ms BOURKE — I think as we go. The CHAIR — That would be good. All right, lead off. Ms BOURKE — Okay. I would like to talk about a couple of issues. The Wimmera Development Association provided a written submission to the inquiry, and in that we were trying to give a perspective of the range of activities that were happening in the region. I think often there is a perception that the regional areas are slower to take up technology than more metropolitan areas, but I think we have some really innovative things happening in the region. The first issue I would like to talk about is within the retail and service sector. One of the key things we are dealing with at the moment is that we are very fortunate that we are one of the earlier regions with the rollout of the national broadband network, so we are actually using that as a promotion to try to raise awareness, in small business particularly, about the opportunities that there are in e-business. The CHAIR — So how are you doing that? Ms BOURKE — We are running a program regionally called Wimmera Streetlife, and there are two main components to it. One is a training component, so we are providing training and information sessions in most communities across the region and looking at things like using social media; web development; customer service is a bit of an issue in some sectors; and also raising awareness about some of the trends in e-business and online shopping. Mr HOWARD — Can I ask you, Jo: what is the profile of the people who are taking advantage of that program? Ms BOURKE — I suppose what we are seeing is that we get good uptake from some of the larger businesses, and we are really working very hard to try to attract family-based businesses and microbusinesses. It is very difficult to get them engaged because, with the limited people involved in those, they are trying to do everything in the business, and they still see anything to do with online, electronic business as an extra; they do not see that it should be incorporated into their business planning completely. At the sessions that we have run so far — the program goes until March — in some communities we have only had 3 or 4 people and in others we have had 30, so there is huge variation in the interest. The next phase of it is that we will be looking at supporting businesses to develop websites and providing the training so that they can actually maintain the information on their websites themselves. One of the things they are attempting to do, and I think we will have some success in this, is looking at some of the business clusters in small towns, where generally there are a couple of young people who are into the technology that will provide support to other businesses in the town. We are just trying to build that local support. Just prior to Christmas we will be building a regional website so that we can connect businesses with existing websites and these new ones we are bringing on board into a directory of online activity. The way we are selling that to the regional community is that young people already do their shopping online. At the moment they do not have easy access to online information about local and regional businesses, so we need to build that, and that will help generate the economic activity in the region. Some older people in the community — I am 31 July 2013 Rural and Regional Committee 2 probably a good example — window-shop online and then go to the local business if they can, so to actually build it so that we are building that more direct link with people is, I think, building a bit more strength into the relationships within the region. We are working with relatively thin markets because we have a low population base, and the mix of businesses in the region continually changes, but we have a number of national brands, and the majority are small family businesses. We just have to try to adjust the balance of how people are spending in the region. Then, hopefully next year, once we have this established, we will be able to promote our regional platform more broadly so that some of the niche businesses we have in the region can actually be exposed more broadly and extend their markets. It is a big undertaking for our region to do something like this, but we think the time is right, with the interest and information coming out around the national broadband network, to try to raise awareness about some of the e-business activities that are very new to some of our businesses. Mr TREZISE — Jo, as part of your submission you mentioned the idea of champions. Did you want to expand on that idea? Ms BOURKE — You will meet some of our champions today through the hearing, but it is about developing some examples from our local community that are actually doing this and starting to develop the story around them about the success, because one of the issues we have with small business is that they see some of this electronic and internet activity as an add-on and they cannot see the economic benefit for it, because when businesses first go into it they do not have an understanding of what the time commitment is or the costs and no understanding of the returns. We need to put some of those examples out so that we get businesses having a bit of a picture of what the opportunity is. I think, with some of the niche businesses that we have, to have potential markets outside the region too is perhaps where we are looking to try to build some of those and, I think, to promote young people in business. That is where the take-up of this activity is, and if we can promote young people, it is a good way to be profiling what is happening in regional Victoria. Generally the diversity of those sorts of businesses too is a good example. The CHAIR — You said there was training. How is that funded? Ms BOURKE — We have funding through the state government through the Streetlife program — through, I think, state development. It was the Department of Business and Innovation. The CHAIR — All right. Good. Ms BOURKE — The focus of that funding was really quite broad, which we like because, again, it enabled us to target our project to what we saw as a real need in the community. The CHAIR — And the people that took it up did well? Ms BOURKE — Yes. The Wimmera Development Association works across the five councils in the region and each of the councils is supporting this program as well; they have actually put some money into it. The CHAIR — Good. Ms BOURKE — I will now move on to the next issue. You are in the Wimmera, so we have to talk about agriculture. I included in my submission a copy of a bit of research that we did regionally; it was completed earlier this year. The driver to do this work was around the rollout of the national broadband network, but also we did not have an understanding of how agriculture is using data, particularly out in the paddock. In speaking to the different sectors in agriculture in the region there seems to be the full range, like in the general community, of how people are using it and what the opportunities are. In agriculture we have some definite champions who are way ahead of the rest of the community, and we wanted to look at how we could support them. I imagine during these hearings you are hearing a lot about poor mobile service and slow internet speeds, and I think they are given. What we are experiencing at the moment with the increase in data use is that our mobile reception is actually shrinking. The technology — the towers — do not have the capacity to handle everyone’s smartphone and tablet. Because of the high data use, the reception is actually decreasing.