Last week, WAFarmers sat down with Telstra and a mixed bag of industry stakeholders for a workshop on regional connectivity. It wasn’t a PR stunt—though Telstra’s recent 3G shutdown debacle and dodgy coverage maps certainly gave them every reason to lay low. Credit where it’s due: they fronted up. The real question is, where was Optus? Probably lounging on its pile of spectrum, still not lifting a finger to share the heavy load of rural coverage.

The brutal truth? We’ve hit the wall on new mobile towers in the bush. The golden age of Royalties for Regions co-funding telecom infrastructure is over, and even the old “third-third-third” Mobile Black Spot model—where the feds, state and telcos split costs—is flatlining.

The Mobile Black Spot Program (MBSP) was initiated a decade ago to improve coverage across regional and remote Australia. Over seven rounds, it helped deliver more than 1,400 new mobile base stations, backed by over $1 billion in combined public and private investment.

But now the writing’s on the wall. Budget papers show funding will fall from $360 million in 2024–25 to just $286 million by 2027–28, before dropping to zero.  Meanwhile, the number of MPs in regional seats continues to shrink, with a Parliament increasingly dominated by city-based politicians more interested in broadband cafés than blackspot maps.

Let’s be honest: no Telstra boardroom is going to minute “Let’s sink hundreds of millions into building $1- $2 million towers to plug gaps across regional Australia.” Certainly not when one suburban tower on the urban fringe can service 10,000 mortgagees scrolling Netflix and TikTok. That’s capitalism doing what it does. Telstra and Optus aren’t charities, and they have no obligation to look after the bush.

And why would they? The federal government sold off spectrum for billions with no strings attached. Not a whisper about using that windfall to actually connect regional Australians. No requirement to build where it’s hard—only a licence to extract where it’s easy. Treasury got its cash; the bush got shafted.

Now we’ve got absurd duplication—Optus and Telstra building towers next to each other in patchy areas, wasting public funds and spectrum alike. What should have happened is clear: the federal government should have mapped a rational, strategic coverage plan for the nation minimising duplication. Then it should have linked spectrum licences to tower-sharing obligations to ensure effective competition and complete coverage.

Instead, we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds—overlap in some areas and no coverage in others. And only government could get it so wrong, on something so obvious.

But instead of fixing the mess, the Albanese Government has all but abandoned blackspot funding and pivoted to building towers for a different kind of signal—green ones. They’re writing $40 billion cheques for wind towers and solar farms, while just 0.5 per cent of that—$200 million—could plug the 3G coverage gaps across the Wheatbelt.

That’s less than a rounding error in the federal budget. It’s the loose change stuck in the Energy Department’s couch cushions—or tucked in the bottom drawer of the Treasurer’s designer desk.

We’re now at a dangerous crossroads. The 3G shutdown—though necessary to protect 4G capacity—has hit coverage. While Starlink may be part of the solution, it tethers you to within 100 metres of the base station on your ute or tractor, it’s not really mobile coverage as we know it. Meanwhile, government and industry keeps pushing digital everything—CBH paddock planners, precision ag, livestock traceability, firearms registration, QR codes for compliance—but it all depends on one thing: connectivity.

Governments understand that a growing population means wider freeways and longer runways. But they still don’t grasp that a modern economy also needs spectrum, towers and service. Selling off Telecom and flogging off spectrum licences doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for what should be treated as essential national infrastructure.

If Canberra can pour $40 billion into renewables—bulldozing broadacre cropping paddocks and ridgelines along the way—surely it can find 10 per cent of that over the next decade to build a fit for purpose hybrid fibre-mobile-satellite network that covers every paddock across Australia.

Yet here we are. No money left for towers. No funding to overhaul the outdated Universal Service Obligation. No serious plan to close the digital divide. Just vague hand-waving about how Elon Musk might sort it all out.

Well, spoiler alert: he won’t. The only towers getting built in the bush these days are 100 metres tall, painted white, and generating renewable energy certificates—not phone coverage. They might look impressive in a UN report, but they won’t let you ring the homestead from the back paddock.

If the government wants to be taken seriously on regional development—and on spreading the half-million migrants arriving each year beyond our major cities—then it must stop treating mobile connectivity as a private-sector problem. It’s time to treat it like the essential service it is.

Because right now, it feels like Canberra is more interested in virtue signalling to the world about climate change than fixing the signal so we can call each other.