SIAA Policy and Strategy Forum Panel

Lisa Vitaris, SIAA (00:04):

Thank you so much everyone here hopefully. Thank you so much to Michelle for the warm welcome and good morning everyone. I am Lisa Vitaris, I’m the director of IAC 2025 Sydney in Australia, which you have probably heard a lot about by now and I look forward to bringing you this discussion on space enabled sectors across sector perspective on the value of space for Australia. We have two excellent speakers here today on the panel and I’m pleased to be joined by Zach Grayson, senior policy officer of National Farmers Federation and Luke Coleman, the CEO of the newly rebranded, I believe Australian Telecommunications Alliance. So please make them both feel very welcome.

Now I’d like to start by asking you both to provide a little bit of an overview about your industry associations, briefly discuss your membership base and just outline a few of your organization’s key focus areas. So maybe we can start with you, Zach.

Zach Grayson (01:02):

Certainly, and firstly, I’d like to apologize. I’m clearly not Troy Williams. I have slightly more hair, but the telecommunications area and new technologies, including how we interact with space is part of my policy area. So I’m really delighted to be here, particularly because agriculture is becoming increasingly dependent on space.

Already around 50% of all Australian farmers are using precision ag technologies. When we talk about the 50% of people who thought that just providing jobs was how the space industry is most impactful on the Australian economy, I can tell you that it’s not just about providing jobs, it’s about underpinning the growth and productivity of agriculture. So the NFF is the National Farmers Federation, it’s the peak body for agriculture in Australia. Our membership includes state farming organizations as well as all of the commodity councils and representatives of the various sectors across agriculture. So it’s a very wide base.

As you probably know, agriculture is incredibly diverse across Australia, but we are all united by, as Dan mentioned earlier this morning, that target of becoming a 100 billion industry by 2030. Now that was decided by industry about eight years ago and we’re well on our way to doing that. But if we are going to become a 100 billion industry, there are some really crucial things that we have to do and that is including uplifting our productivity, which is a continual challenge and really fundamental to what we do, but also becoming more sustainable and remaining globally competitive. Now, I certainly won’t mention Trump here, but he continues to keep us very busy in a very trade affected industry with 70% of Australian agricultural product being exported, we remain very vulnerable to the winds of the global market with challenges there. But if a hundred billion dollars is, it’s a nice headline target, but it also underpins our ideas of what thriving regions should look like and I think space plays a really important part in that as well. Great. Thank you

Lisa:

Luke. Thank you.

Luke Coleman:

Good morning everyone. I’m Luke Coleman. I’m the CEO of the recently rebranded Australian Telecommunications Alliance, the ATA. For the last 19 years, we’ve been known as Communications Alliance. The reason for the rebrand over the last decade, communications Alliance have grown its membership to include digital platforms, social media services, search engines, even streaming services. There was a real trend in the industry towards what people called convergence between old media and new media, telco’s, streaming services. But I think what we’ve seen in more recent years is a divergence of those policy issues. The telco sector and the issues that affect the telco sector are very different to the policy and regulatory issues that affect the digital platforms, the streaming services, the social media services. So we’ve been through a ‘conscious uncoupling,’ as celebrity couples might phrase it. We are now the clear and undiluted voice of the telco sector.

So this rebrand was only announced last Thursday. It’s all very fresh, but that is our ambition. We speak for the telco industry, but our members, particularly for this audience also include many players in the satellite sector. And I’m joined here by my colleague Mike Johns, who is here in the audience. Mike for many, many years has convened our satellite services working group within what was formerly known as Communications Alliance. What I love about this is for a very long time, I think the satellite industry within the telco space has sat within its own silo. Optus has had its satellite business. NBN Co has its Sky Muster operation, but they often sit on their own quite separate to the terrestrial telecommunications business. What we’ve seen in recent years is a rapid merging of the services between terrestrial networks and satellite based networks. The arrival of Starlink has probably been the thing that has driven so much of that, but with Amazon Kuiper hot on its heels, Telesat, other LEO networks and MEO networks coming into the play.

The distinction between traditional terrestrial telco services and new and quite revolutionary satellite services, it’s almost indistinguishable. And this is where it gets interesting for the ATA. We are not just a lobby group, we are an organization that is established in legislation under the Telecommunications Act to develop industry codes and standards. We are a recognized standards development organization by standards Australia, and so we develop not only industry codes on technical matters, but also technical standards as well.

So this is going to get interesting for the work that we do because as a consumer, when you send a text on your Apple iPhone, there was a point 10 years ago where that text was carried by Telstra or Opus or Vodafone. It was a carrier enabled service of data going over a specific data stream on that carrier’s network. In recent years, we’ve seen the arrival and the evolution of over the top services like iMessage, which completely cut the carriers out of the equation. It’s just another bit of data, no different to any other bit of data. They don’t see the message. The message is not regulated in the same way. The message does not have the same interception powers attached to it through legislation.

Now we’re seeing third phase of that where those messages might be carried by satellite service or multiple satellite services where Apple has its proprietary technology with Global star, for example, but it could also be carried by the carrier, which has a local deal with Starlink or another LEO satellite operator. You can just imagine the regulatory complexity and the technical complexity that this opens up. I have gone way off topic with this introduction, but I’m getting so wound up about it.  Just to give you a little taste of what we might get into today, I’m really genuinely excited about the prospect of what can happen with the convergence of terrestrial telecommunications technologies with satellite technologies, and I think that should hopefully set the scene for our conversation today. Thank you.

Lisa:

Very exciting. And it sounds like space is a big part of both of your sectors, which is not surprising hence why you are here. But what I’d love to find out is just out of your member base, how many of your members are actually that aware of the space services out there? What is the level of understanding of space capability of your membership base, and are any of your members utilizing space capability or advanced technologies to increase productivity? And I think you’ve both touched on that a fair bit, but it’d be great to just find out a little bit more about that detail maybe starting with yourself again.

Zach:

Sure. I mean there are so many ways in which rely on space technology space enabled technology already. I mean, going back many years we’ve been early adopters of a range of technologies. Obviously precision agriculture and autonomous tractors for example, relies on global positioning systems, but farmers are know a lot of arts when it comes to space, and I think we have this image of the Australian farmer as being outdated and stuck in their ways and that’s not correct. I’d like to particularly talk about one use case that you might not be aware of, which is virtual fencing or geofencing is slightly different, but virtual fencing is the idea that we no longer need to send a crew of people out to do hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fencing, which can be easily washed away. And the floods that happened up in way in the mid north coast of New South Wales recently.

But if we put a collar on an animal that can send an audio cue or a mild electrical stimulus, 100th of the strength of a typical electric fence, which if you’ve ever been out in the country, I don’t recommend touching one of those. That’s a mistake I don’t like to repeat. The virtual fencing was only introduced in Tasmania about two years ago now about 20% of Tasmanian dairy farmers are using virtual fencing. That’s a massive uptake in just a couple of years in New Zealand, we’re up to about 150,000 dairy cows that have adopted this technology. If we continue at that rate, we can see the kind of productivity gains and things that we can progress when we’re adopting this technology. But that’s one really interesting use case that you may not have heard of. Precision agriculture is probably the one that most springs to mind, and there’s all sorts of other ones I don’t want to take away from the next panel and disaster resilience and things like that.

But in emergency scenarios, that’s crucial to farmers and we’re using satellite mapping to look at overland flow of water to look at water rates in catchments, which can really be used to predict things. And then if we combine that, let’s say with virtual fencing, you might move your stock away from a dangerous area where typically previously you couldn’t do that because of existing fences. So when we combine all of these things together, we look at greater productivity. But I think while we are early adopters of some of this great technology, and I said before, almost 50% of Australian farms rely on precision agriculture, so almost 50% of Australian farms rely on space and our technology, while some are going to be early adopters, awareness and understanding is always going to be variable and so is access to technology. And a lot of that fundamentally comes back to our connectivity. It’s all well and good to have remote sensors in paddocks. It’s all well and good to GPS map of property, but if you don’t have a cell phone signal, if you can’t run a lot of these highly advanced apps or technologies that we have on the ground, you can’t do that without a very baseline level of connectivity. So there are always going to be challenges and they’re facing the challenges of today is a key part of what we do so that we can enable the uptake of those technologies tomorrow.

Lisa:

You already gave us a good understanding of what’s happening, but anything else you’d like to add there in terms of your members’ space capabilities and understanding and opportunity?

Luke:

I think similar to what farmers are seeing across a range of sectors in regional and remote areas, satellite is revolutionizing the economics of telecommunications networks. I’ll give you one example. Prior to joining the Australian Telecommunications Alliance, I worked at a company called Vocus. Vocus is a major fiber backbone operator. They also provide the ground station equipment for Starlink, so the dishes on the ground, the fiber backhaul that connects into their network. Now, their entire business model prior to the arrival of s Starling was based on building ginormous fiber optic cables right out into the middle of a remote area to connect, let’s say a mine. Mining and resources, very lucrative industry for the telecommunication sector because they need unbelievable amounts of data. Everything’s automated on mines driving, trucks, safety, everything. It’s all done digitally and it’s all done remotely either from Perth, sometimes even from Singapore.

So they need massive amounts of data. Now to build a fiber optic cable out to a mining site, let’s say in the remote region of the Pilbara, you are looking at tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The business case and the barriers to market entry are enormous. And so for most mines operating in those remote regions, they have been stuck with a monopoly for many, many years because it is just so prohibitive to build something of that scale, of that magnitude.

Now, contrast that with a mining operator that was in remote South Australia. They were given a quote to provide a new fiber line. Unsurprisingly, that quote came in at tens of millions of dollars to build that fiber optic cable so they could get multiple gigabits per second to get out to that mine to automate it. They then got a quote using a low earth orbit satellite service. It came in at tens of thousands of dollars to deliver the same amount of capacity that they required gigabits per second. It was so that their staff could watch Netflix at the end of the day, entertainment connecting with their family, but they were also using it for automation and for business applications for operational technologies.

That just completely flips the economic equation upside down if you are going from tens of millions of dollars for connectivity to tens of thousands of dollars for connectivity. Now in this case, it wasn’t just an off the rack Starlink dish that they bought from JB HiFi, they had I think 10 or 12 dishes that were all connected to provide that level of throughput with enterprise grade management services on top of it. So it was a real enterprise grade service, but it still just illustrates the revolutionary productivity benefits you get.

Now, that’s just one example from the resources sector. We’ve heard a few examples from the farming sector as well, but I think for Australia, which so much of our economy is based on mining and resources almost entirely in extremely remote areas, agriculture almost entirely in extremely remote areas is hard to think of another economy anywhere in the world like Australia that can benefit so much from revolutionary new satellite services to enable those productivity benefits.

Lisa:

Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Thank you. And I think everyone can appreciate the need for Netflix and no matter where you are and maintaining contact with family and friends. So absolutely important. I’d like to ask both of you what the key challenges are in your industries at the moment as well. So what are you facing, and we’ve already spoken about some of the examples where space-based technologies can help you, but what are those core challenges that are really kind of really annoying those farmers out there for instance?

Zach:

There are a lot of key challenges facing our industry at the moment, but also a lot of great opportunities. One of the challenges that we’re facing is in workforce. We know that getting workers that are highly skilled out to regions to do a lot of these often difficult and draining jobs, that can be a key challenge. It’s an ongoing challenge. And so automated technology is a really great example of how we can address those workforce challenges. I was at a conference last week in the grains industry looking at some of the great innovations that we can do with precision ag technology and automated tractors and things like that. And one thing that really struck me was how far this technology had come in just five or 10 years using GPS based and other GNSS systems, the level of precision that we can get with what would be effectively an amateur such as myself driving a tractor is equivalent to someone that’s been driving the tractor for 50 years.

You’re mapping out your fields using precision technology, and it might be using your agronomist to tell you what precise rates of inputs you might need, whether that’s fertilizers, whether that’s pesticides, and whether that’s just the seeding itself. And then you can within two and a half centimeters for each line that you do guaranteed for five years, your tractor will hit that line within two and a half centimeters each way. And so if you can do that and put someone, it might be a backpacker, it might be your 15-year-old child, although we know that you shouldn’t be using 15-year-old children, we don’t. We don’t. If you could put me or you out onto a tractor having never been in the grands industry before and get that level of precision that previously and variable rates across the paddock that previously someone would’ve needed 40 years of driving a tractor to achieve that level of yield and productivity.

So workforce is a really key one, and we know what a lot of the other challenges are facing, not just the farming sector, but Australia as a whole. One is climate change. We’re going to have to adapt to the changing climate and the increasing risk of biosecurity, incursions, the increasing risk of natural disasters and droughts like we’re currently experiencing in the southern half of Australia. And there are many ways that the space industry can help us do that. And whether that’s mapping vegetation growth, water usage, and a whole range of other factors that previously we could only dream of, now we are getting the technology to be able to and the data to help us make real time decisions and to be more resilient and prepared ahead of those natural disasters in those droughts.

Lisa:

Thank you. We know the space industry is very complex, but obviously the agricultural sector, it has its range of complexities as well, and it’s great that we can work together to try and solve some. And in telecommunications, what are the largest challenges that you’re experiencing at the moment?

Luke:

I am very optimistic that satellite will solve some of the biggest challenges that the telco industry currently faces. The single biggest issue that we face as an industry is investment. How are we going to get the investment required for the next generation of connectivity in Australia? Now, part of that puzzle that satellite will help solve is the investment appetite for regional and remote deployments is effectively zilch.

In a previous life, I was an advisor to the minister when we first did the mobile black swap program. If you look back 10 years ago, it was 10 years ago this year that that program started the first round of that program. Overwhelmingly successful. Government put in a hundred million dollars industry more than doubled that amount of money. Hundreds of new base stations were built, second round of funding, less amount of money from industry, more investment from government, third round, less from industry, again, more from government. Each subsequent round of that program, the amount of investment that industry is willing to contribute has tapered off to effectively zero. And on the previous panel, you would’ve heard Sam Grunhard from the Department of Communications talk about that. We have reached the geographic and economic edge of where telcos are willing to invest in terrestrial mobile infrastructure. Now, the business case does not stack up. You’ve got to the point now where a new mobile tower, which the logistics of building a mobile tower, let’s say ballpark, it costs about $1.3 million. That’s the average through the mobile black spot program and what that tower costs to build. But if you are building that for a town that’s got 20 people, or it’s on a main road where you might have 20 trucks pass through for one or two minutes each day, the business case dries up satellite and the capability of satellite and direct to device connectivity completely, or at least largely solves that problem. I say at least largely because of course, satellite doesn’t give you the full capabilities of 4G or 5G. You’re not going to be watching YouTube videos or cat videos on Facebook in the same way that you would on your mobile handset connected to 4G or 5G. But for safety to be able to make a voice call if you’re in an accident, if your tire blows up on a remote road, it completely changes the game.

So I think for an industry that is struggling to find where the next wave of investment is going to come from, part of that challenge is solved by a satellite because if you look at all of the government funding programs that have been designed to help resolve this problem, the mobile black spot program is one of them. We have the on-farm connectivity program. We have direct subsidies to NBN Co for its Sky Muster network and for its fixed wireless network. All of these things [cost] hundreds of millions of dollars.

In fact, if you add up the annual subsidies and cross subsidies that go into regional tele telecommunications in Australia every year, it’s more than $1 billion a year. Combine the universal service obligation, the USO: $250 million a year. The regional broadband scheme, which cross subsidizes NBN’s satellite and fixed wireless networks – that’ll hit $1 billion next year alone. There’s one and a quarter billion dollars already. Mobile black spot program, on-farm connectivity program, add all of these things up. And you get to the point where, as the previous panel discussed, you go, why are we actually subsidizing any of these things?

We’ve got a revolutionary technology in the form of low earth satellite services that ticks all of the boxes that we’re trying to tick with these programs. Why do we need to continue subsidizing them at all? Or if we do, we need to start subsidizing them in a completely different way because the problem that we’re trying to solve now has totally changed. So I think that the arrival, I shouldn’t just say LEO, it’s a combination of LEO, MEO and GEO traditional satellite services that will solve this problem, but it has completely changed the policy landscape for how we approach regional telecommunications in Australia. And I think that is a fantastic thing.

Lisa:

Thanks, Luke. Maybe we can stick with you just whilst you’re on that train thought.

Luke:

Sure. I’ve got momentum now. Keep me going. You’ve got the momentum

Lisa:

Into the future, so I’m really keen to hear where you see where you both see your respective industries in the next decade, and you’ve started to talk about that. So what are the key trends, policies, and capability developments that we need to watch for?

Luke:

The acceleration of the merging of satellite and traditional telco services will only accelerate over the next decade. At the moment, we have one global LEO network in the form of Starlink. We’ve got a few more hot on their heels. So when we have competitive global LEO networks offering competitive services to telcos to do direct to handset or direct to consumers if they’re selling them antennas that they can just go and buy a satellite service – that will deliver just extreme benefits for Australians over the next 10 years.

As Sam Grunhard said on the previous panel, we have a situation today where a telco might cover 99.5% of the population or whatever that figure is, but it’s less than a third of Australia’s landmass. You will never cover all of Australia’s landmass with a terrestrial mobile network unless you want to bankrupt the country.

But today, overnight – overnight! We have got 100% geographic coverage thanks to direct to handset technology. This technology is less than a year old. It is wild. We have solved the universal service problem overnight, and we’ve got the government has committed to legislating what it calls the UOMO, the universal outdoor mobile obligation, which solves that. Now again, it’s not the same as having a 5G service. It’s not going to give you that same level of connectivity. But from a policy maker’s perspective, the amount of problems that are solved by direct to handset technology are just remarkable.

It also opens a new can of worms from a regulatory perspective. Though on one hand, yes, we are solving a problem of triple zero, an emergency calling – if you can make a call from anywhere in Australia, fantastic outcome. But let’s pull on that thread a little bit. It’s the A TA that does a lot of codes and standards around triple zero service. What’s required for telco operators to connect you through to triple zero to ensure that that call gets through and when your call gets through to ensure that the triple zero operator knows where you are and they can find you.

Now, put on top of that, you’ve got Apple’s proprietary emergency text-based service using its agreement with Globalstar so that if you’re in a car accident or you have a medical emergency, you can connect without any connection to the terrestrial network through to an emergency service. Now, that is a global service that they provide, but it’s a proprietary system delivered by a company that is not domiciled in Australia. Strangely, because the Australian emergency call service does not have a text capability, that is routed through Europe, and somebody in a call center in Europe then contacts the triple zero operator in Australia to say, we’ve received an emergency call, someone’s in trouble. And that’s just one service.

So if you are now using the latest iPhone handset, yes, you can connect through their proprietary system to make one of those emergency calls, or well, you might have a Telstra SIM in that handset. And Telstra also has an agreement with Starlink to use their service using their spectrum to place that emergency call, which is effectively indifferent, imperceptible to being a terrestrial based service. Again, you can just imagine the regulatory complexity that comes out of this.

So I don’t want to sound like a negative Nelly about it. It is an amazing opportunity, but in an environment where we are likely to have a number of global LEO operators controlling a growing amount of the market in Australia that has traditionally been completely controlled and owned by Australian domiciled, Australian owned, Australian operated networks that are subject to Australian law, that are subject to Australian interception powers, that are subject to Australian cybersecurity obligations, and all of a sudden you’re having a lot more of that traffic being routed through Los Angeles or through a data center based in Europe or the US. It opens up a whole range of issues that we haven’t even started to wrestle with yet.

Lisa:

It sounds like plenty more panels come in the future to wrangle all of those issues. And what about in the agricultural sector? What are you seeing as the future pathway?

Zach:

Yeah, I mean, I echo so many of the things that you say about the transformative potential of these new technologies, but I do previously on previous panels, we’ve heard people talk about having beef with each other, and I think it’s probably more relevant for me representing the agriculture industry just been about having beef with you. But if there is one thing that the space industry and the telecommunications industry is frustrating consumers when it comes to the emergence of these new LEO enabled technologies, it’s the wording, it’s the communications of will we pick satellite to mobile, direct to device, direct to handset? Yeah. Is there any

Speaker 3 (27:39):

Others that I’ve minister? We love acronyms in telco, so if we can get three acronyms for the same service, we think that’s a win. But yeah, we’ll try to narrow down for you.

That’s my challenge to you today. But I think many of the things that you’ve said are absolute priorities for how we see the ag industry moving forward. I can’t stress enough the importance of the triple zero, the importance of access to emergency services in times of need, especially in the wake of the 3G shutdown, where many people across Australia, particularly regional or remote areas and farmers, a large cohort of that have lost service that they previously relied on, whether that was guaranteed coverage as per the maps or not. But we’re seeing quite bizarrely a surge in sales of the old two-way radios because that’s a reliable technology. So we look at the future and the transformative potential of LEO SATs, but at the same time, we have to recognize that there are many challenges very pressing right now. But looking at the trends for agriculture over the next 10, 15, 20 years, a really interesting piece of work, and I encourage you to read it, it was put out by CSRO called the AG 2050 scenarios report.

It looks at what agriculture could be like if we embraced the transformative potential of innovation. And it’s not just about what ag looks like, but what our regions around that look like and how it interplays with other industries. So if you’ve got 10 minutes to think about the future of Australian agriculture, I really encourage you to spend it reading that wonderful piece of work by C-S-I-R-O. I think some of the trends that we need to see are trends that we’re seeing already, which is increasing adoption of new technologies and intensification of our r and d. And I know that many of you in this room will be looking at r and d from a broader perspective, but we in agriculture have a long and proud history of RD and a very unique structure in the global environment of using levies, partnered with funding for specific agricultural r and d, and that’s delivered some major step changes over the last 20 years.

In terms of the tools and the capabilities of our industry. We know that we’re going to need to address a whole range of challenges. Things like climate change, things like workforce, things like global instability, and all of those things require us to continually improve our productivity and look for new ways of doing old things. And for me, I see precision agriculture, I see the expanding use cases for satellite imagery, and I see director handset connectivity and all of our Leos sat connectivity as being fundamental to how agriculture can make a step change in productivity over the next 10 years.

Lisa:

Thank you. I’m going to skip ahead to probably my favourite question and one which I think everyone will benefit from hearing from you both about. But just in terms of the biggest barriers, what are the biggest barriers to the adoption of space enabled technologies across your respective sectors and how could they be overcome? So is there anything that we need to try and do more broadly or is it something that you could potentially do in your industry associations? What are the biggest barriers that we’re experiencing for those few that aren’t really engaged in the space enabled technologies already?

Luke:

I would say one of the barriers ironically is one that government has created for itself. For so long in regional and remote telecommunications policy that all of our government policies and funding programs have been based on the concept that these services are non-commercial and they will never be commercial. That’s how we got the universal service obligation with Telstra, that there is always going to be a cohort of less than a million Australians, let’s say 800,000 Australians that will never be commercially served by the market, and will always require government intervention and government funding to sustain them. And that mentality has been true for so long. It was correct, and it’s how we’ve got to where we are with NBN and Sky Muster. Of course, it was that same cohort that last two or 3% of Australia that would never be commercially served, that needed an entirely government owned, government subsidized satellite service to provide them with connectivity.

And so we built a very tangled web of subsidies and cross subsidies, often based in legislation. It is not easy to undo laws to solve that problem. And so I say this is ironic because today, for the first time in history with the arrival of LEO satellite services, that mentality, that whole way of approaching regional telecommunications is broken.

There is now a commercially available, zero-public-subsidy service available to 100% of Australia’s landmass that you can go out and buy today, and you can be online in 10 minutes and you can have broadband speeds faster than the average NBN connection that people enjoy in the cities. Now to be clear, that’s not the average NBN connection that’s available in the cities – it’s the NBN connection that people are willing to pay for in cities. It is revolutionary.

And so I think that strangely, one of the biggest barriers we’ve created to greater uptake of satellite services is that if you are a satellite operator playing in a purely competitive market where you are not attracting any government subsidies, you are just selling it off the shelf and you’re selling your monthly fee, you are competing against inferior services that are very, very heavily subsidized, whether that is a USO service or a service that’s cross subsidized through the regional broadband scheme.

And this is no criticism of Telstra or NBN delivering those services. This is the legislative environment that has created these cross-subsidy programs. It is frankly unfair. And so I think we need to go back and to completely reset our expectations about what is that baseline service that a customer in regional Australia wants? Because the universal service obligation ain’t it. A universal service obligation, in law, delivers you a plain old telephone service. That’s it. It doesn’t even give you broadband, it doesn’t even give you internet, doesn’t even give you dial up, gives you plain old telephone service. That’s it.

The regional broadband scheme that cross subsidizes the NBN, it guarantees you an NBN Sky Muster service. Now, I remember it was 10 years ago this year that Sky Muster launched. I was very annoyed. I was an advisor at the time, and I didn’t get an invite to go to French Guiana for the launch. I watched it on video about four o’clock in the morning. It was pretty cool. But here we are, it is 10 years later, those satellites were designed to last until 2032. They are being cross subsidized until 2032 – that is in law. Just last week, NBN said they’re going to start decommissioning those satellites from 2029, possibly even earlier if they can offload them.

And so we’ve got this complete disconnect between the legislative environment, which has been established  to cross subsidize what are meant to be lost making services, to a new competitive environment where if you are a consumer in regional Australia, you can choose your NBN Sky Muster service and you will get it at a much cheaper cost as a consumer compared to buying a Starlink service or what will in future possibly be, whether it’s Amazon Kuiper or OneWeb or any range of other new operators that are going to be playing in that market.

So I think to get back to your original question, what are the biggest barriers to greater uptake? We have an incredibly modern market in satellite that is having its hands tied behind its back by legacy legislation and regulation that is distorting the market economics.

Lisa:

Right. Well, that doesn’t sound like an easy one to solve overnight and a few more panels in that one too. And what about in the agricultural sector?

Zach:

Yeah, I completely agree with your frustrations around some of the legislative environments and the regulatory pathways that we’re dealing with, particularly around modernizing the US side and the RBS. That’s something that we deal in quite regularly as well. And another, we’ve worked together on some of that in the past. So there is such a broad variety of space enabled technology or in use or available that it can be hard to know where to start. And firstly, you need reliable connectivity, which up until now or up until the very near future hasn’t been available for everybody. And so because of the diversity of options to get a farm connected, and that might be a farm that is 10,000 hectares, to connect all of that reliably from your shearing shed to your multiple tractors, to outposts to water sensors in every paddock, in every trough in every paddock, you require incredibly complex, often incredibly complex connectivity solutions.

So understanding what will work for you specifically and not just what’s on the market is incredibly important. And I think I’ve got to give price to the government here for funding what is called the regional tech hub, and that’s delivered by the NFF independently to provide free and independent advice to everyone in regional Australia about what connectivity options are available to them. And if you know people in regional Australia, please, I encourage you because the level of expertise that they have, it constantly astounds me as someone living in inner city Canberra who I don’t know how your mobile phone service is here, but my NBN here is also still struggling at my house. But so one thing is being able to understand the options available to you, especially in incredibly complex farming environments where you might be looking at satellite imagery positioning as well as multiple sensors all around the cost also of having these highly complex systems.

It can also be a barrier to entry. And we’re really looking at opportunities like Starlink, and as you talked about in remote minds, we’re experiencing that same thing, a drastic reduction in the cost of really functional base level connectivity, which is really wonderful opportunity for a lot of farmers around the country. But I think the other point that we haven’t touched on yet is data. And there’s an incredibly fragmented data ecosystem in agriculture at the moment. Producers are being asked to one supply data to a broader range of stakeholders than ever before, and that includes government organizations. That includes things like scope three emissions reporting, which is coming into the future. Where big banks are required are requiring producers to supply vast amounts of data to be able to ascertain their sustainability credentials. And we are creating all of this data in part through the use of satellite imaging, precision agriculture and remote sensing technology.

But then where does this data go? How do we use it interoperably with a range of systems from those things that we’re being required to do on a credential wise to the things that our agronomist might use to plan out the future of our farm, our yield mapping and things like that. And if this data isn’t interoperable, then that’s a massive problem, but also who owns this data? What do we do with it in the future for agriculture to fully embrace the potential of space as a space enabled industry? We need to recognize that there is incredible value in this data. And so one thing that the industry has done over the last few years has come up with what’s called a farm data code, which is a voluntary code. And I know some people will be pushing for this to become mandatory and legislated around the country in the years to come, but it’s a voluntary code for anyone that uses or creates data on the farm, which is a very, very high level of trust.

It’s a certification that farmers can understand one where and how and why their data is being used and guarantee that they can use it interoperably with many of their other systems that they can take it out at any other point. And so I think this is a really revolutionary kind of offering in terms of one of the biggest barriers, which is this fear and this concern over why are we creating so much data if we don’t know where it’s going and if we don’t know how other people will use it and potentially not in the best interests of our farm and our production.

Lisa:

Thank you. I could keep asking questions all afternoon, but I won’t because I know we’ll go away over time. I just wanted to get a time check. Should we go to audience questions? Yes, maybe any questions from our audience for this wonderful panel with everything that you’ve heard so far? Anyone have a question? One, two over there? Three, maybe hear first. Yeah,

Question:

Thank you. And firstly, thanks for being in the room. I think it’s really important that we are hearing about the applications of the technology back here on earth. My question is, in the rollout of these discussions, if that farmer using virtual fencing or however you want to describe it, do they consider themselves a space enabled technology company? Should they be in the room with us? Or is it the role of us to be better engaged with players like yourselves? Because one of the questions is, when does Australia export technology? Are we just going to import it from overseas players or when do we take a lead and start to take our technology out globally?

Zach:

That is such a good question. I really appreciate that. The reality is that Australian companies are doing some incredibly innovative things when it comes to the products that we’re creating in space and now agriculture. So one example that I absolutely love was to create new varieties of, let’s say wheat for example, or any sort of grains. There are multiple things you can do. We know about genetic modification. Now there’s gene editing, which is the next level. The other one is mutagenesis, which is you might heat it up really high or you might try expose it to radiation and see what that does to the genetic code. Right now, if you want to expose something to radiation, there’s a very easy way of doing that, and that’s looking up. So we’ve been sending grains into space to see how they will react and see how that will affect their genetic code.

So there’s lots of really interesting ways that we’re using space and products that we will then export to the rest of the world. Fingers crossed that the radiation turns out to be favourable to that genetic code, who knows? But I’m not really sure. I think there’s a mix in that we need to collaborate better in understanding and in teaching or telling our story to Australia about how valuable space is to all of these industries, whether that’s mining or agricultural or many others, logistics to be one. I think that the value proposition for all of these industries has to be quite clear. The value proposition for a farmer on the ground has to be, yes, my yields might be higher because I’m using precision agriculture, or I’m adopting remote sensors enabled by high levels of client activity infrastructure around my farm. So the value proposition needs to be really clear, but then we need to tell our story in interlinked ways. And I think part of that is going back to those survey results, which I found just absolutely fascinating, is the majority of Australians don’t think that they use space network technologies in every day of their life. And yet how often how many people use Google Maps to get here today?

So I think that in telling our story about the way that space industry in Australia interacts with our everyday life, we need to reframe what the space industry does. And that for me personally is looking at space infrastructure as being no different to any other core economic infrastructure in Australia. That’s roads, that’s rail, that’s energy. That for me tells the story of space as being fundamental not just to defense to national security, but also to economic productivity and also to those other really important things like health and education in the bush. So I think part of it is about how we tell our story not just as a space industry, not just as an ag industry, but in terms of space being crucial to the here and now, essential to underpinning our future productivity rather than just as something futuristic and nice to have.

Lisa:

Thank you. Great answer. I do want to see if we’re allowed to have two more questions. One more question, one more question. I think you have the mic next you with Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, please go ahead. Sorry. You can ask question.

Question:

Thanks, Zach. That’s probably the best summary of the impact of the space sector and the agriculture sector I’ve ever heard. So thank you for that. And likewise, Luke, thanks for summary of the impact of my question is for Luke, are Starlink and Amazon members of the ATA, and how do we deal with the national security implications of increasingly using foreign owned operators for crew infrastructure? How do you see that going over years?

Luke

Starlink is a member, Amazon has been a member more broadly, however, this is a complicated one, right? Because as I mentioned earlier, we have become a more strict telco organization. Amazon is a very broad organization that includes digital platforms, devices in Kindles, and in future, Kuiper. So at the moment, no, Amazon is not a member. However, who knows what might happen when Kuiper is actually a live in operational service in future.

To your question about security implications for Australia, look, I think the reality is Australia is not going to have its own LEO satellite network anytime soon, if ever. They are, by definition, global networks. And we need to find a reasonable balance of addressing our own sovereignty and our own security requirements in Australia with an acknowledgement that we would be insane to miss out on these technologies that are there.

When LEO services and Starlink in particular first started emerging over the last couple of years, I’ve been at a number of conferences where people were saying, “We’ve got to have our own LEO network! We can’t have crazy Elon Musk, what if he goes nuts and turns the thing off and we’re all cut off overnight?” Now that hasn’t happened. But the alternative, if you go to the other extreme of, well, the Australian Government’s got to launch its own LEO network in what is such a completely new market – I think we need to find the right balance within Australia.

We have our own ground station network. Those ground stations connect through to Australian fiber optic backbone networks. They are, in almost all cases, also owned and operated by Australian telecommunications providers. Those Australian telecommunications providers are, almost in all cases, in a wholesale agreement with those LEO satellite operators.

So the degree of Australian domestic involvement in that broad value chain is actually quite significant. They might not own the birds in the sky, but that is only a very, very small part of that broader value chain for LEO satellite provision.

So I think that the approach Australia has taken to date has been a rational one. And by continuing to have those partnerships between global players and local operators, that is a sensible way that we can address some of those sovereignty and security concerns that some people have raised.

Lisa:

Thank you. Great questions, and sorry we didn’t have time for any others. A very, very exciting discussion today. So please join me in banking our two panellists, Luke and Zach.