WHEN the Founding Fathers gave the Commonwealth Parliament power to make law with respect to “”postal, telegraphic and other like services”, they recognised, even in the 1890s, the national importance of communications, and that communications was not like other commodities. Since then, successive Federal Parliaments have regulated the provision of communication services, recognising there is a community element to such things as postal and telephone services, especially in a country like Australia where distances as so vast.
The regulation has usually taken the form of cross-subsidies so that people in remote areas do not have to pay the crippling actual cost of the provision of services, but could get them at reasonable costs like their city cousins. Thus, it cost as much to post a letter from Cooma South to Perth as from Cooma South to Cooma North. In telephone services, the cross-subsidy took the form of provide comparatively cheap installation in the bush. And people in their own communities could ring each other for a set fee, irrespective of the time of the call. Long-distance calls, through necessity, remained distance-charged.
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