As Malcolm Turnbull flew into Birdsville over the vastness of the red brown gibber rock and the channel country dunes there was barely a sign of human life.

He was greeted at the airport by Bruce Scott, the long-serving federal member for the electorate of Maranoa – at 740,000 square kilometres, it is 25,000 times bigger than Turnbull’s inner Sydney electorate of Wentworth and also, Scott cheerily notes, bigger than the US state of Texas. Turnbull was also greeted by local Indigenous woman Fiona Gadsby, who did not know who was coming but had brought her two-year-old son Jahkia down because “he’s mad about planes.”

But after the minister and his party wheeled their bags through the quiet of the fading light over to the famous Birdsville pub and motel, just at the edge of the tarmac, they were confronted with what looked like a raucous set from the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Birdsville, with its population of 110 – except for the first week in September, when 6,000 visitors arrive for the annual race meet – was hosting the Trailblazers four-wheel-drive rally, a fundraiser for Angel Flights, a charity that coordinates flights to help remote Australians access non-emergency specialist medical treatment that would otherwise be unavailable.

Participants had taken over the outdoor back bar of the pub for a huge party that appeared to have the dual themes of Abba and Priscilla and the beer was already flowing and the stock whips cracking around a campfire lit to combat the evening chill.

Locals in well-worn bush hats and boots mingled with Trailblazer men dressed in crazily amateurish hammed-up drag and multicoloured wigs. Introduced by Lance Smith, the event organiser, Turnbull joked that with an electorate encompassing Kings Cross he felt right at home and was promptly ambushed by two blokes clad in biker gear wearing bright red lipstick – Peter Lowe and Rob Tassini – who raised a roar from the crowd by kissing the bemused minister on either cheek. He’d slipped away for a meeting and a quieter drink in the atmospheric front bar not long after drag comedian Sofia made her entrance in a beribboned Priscilla-style bus and took to the stage with a decidedly R-rated routine.

In the front bar, Scott and the more conventionally-dressed locals were intent upon bending the minister’s ear rather than dancing to Dancing Queen.

The Barcoo and Diamantina Shire councils want $10m in federal funding towards a plan to lay 700km of optic cable between five remote towns to improve their patchy and slow internet and they would also like mobile phones to work when they drive further than 10km out of town. They see it as an existential issue.

“We are concerned about how we attract employees … about how we retain young people here … we are just concerned we are going to be left behind,” says Barcoo Shire’s deputy mayor, Michael Pratt, at a town meeting the next day at the Birdsville Bakery, which boasts both curried camel and kangaroo and red wine pies, as well as inch-thick custard slices.

Chris Crawford, one of two fly-in-fly-out nurses who staff the Birdsville clinic, has a similar plea. With scheduled flying doctor visits once a fortnight and the nearest emergency doctor a few hours’ flight away, she says reliable video links to replace the existing unreliable satellite-based service would be invaluable in an emergency or accident, especially in winter when the tourists hit town.

At the school, Nadine Lorenz is mother to two of the six children in the classroom and facilitator of the adjoining e-kindy, where four pre-schoolers have internet-based lessons with a teacher in Brisbane. She drives 100km to Birdsville each school week from Durie Station in part because distance education was so difficult with an unreliable internet service.

At the Longreach School of Distance Education the next day parent after parent calls in from stations sprawling 900km apart from Winton to Quilpie, all with the same complaint – distance education is impossible because the very expensive satellite internet services constantly fail. They talk about getting up at 5am to try to pay a bill online, struggling to find staff willing to live without mobile phones or internet connections and trying to keep children engaged during internet-based lessons when they can hear audio but see just a blank screen.

“Even the free Wi-Fi at Maccas works better than what we get at home,” says Jesse Pennissi, from Noonbah Station near a town called Stonehenge.

After the unsuccessful spill motion against Tony Abbott in February, Turnbull’s every move and media utterance is scrutinised for leadership implications. This trip is hard to cast in that light since Scott sits in the Nationals party room and does not have a vote in any ballot, although some Nationals have made dark threats about splitting the coalition should Turnbull ever return to the top job.

In any event, Scott has insisted the minister come to the parts of his electorate dissatisfied with their communications and still waiting for the promised new satellite service (due to replace the former government’s interim service in the middle of next year) rather than parts further east where the national broadband network has begun to roll out.

And the locals in the far west of Queensland have far more practical things on their minds. The possibility of Turnbull becoming prime minister is raised only once, at a town meeting at a pub in Yaraka, population 24 – 220km south of Longreach or a bumpy hour-long flight in a eight-seater plane – quickly batted away with the well-practiced assurance that no change was likely and the country was in capable hands.

Yaraka, a community refusing to bow to the blows of its railway line being disused and its school being closed in 2009, has no mobile phone service and would like a tower on nearby Mount Slowcombe to rectify that situation, as well as faster internet than is available under the current interim satellite service for remote communities.

“For $70 a month I get a lousy 1 gigabyte and it still takes me a long time to download even the most basic pdf document” says Mary Killeen, local branch president of the isolated children’s parents’ association.

“They say we don’t use the internet much, but that’s because it is so slow we don’t have the choice. We have a greater need for internet than anyone else in Australia.”

But Turnbull has not come bearing promises or money. Sydney MP Paul Fletcher, Turnbull’s parliamentary secretary, can give no assurances about the $100m set aside by the government for mobile phone “black spots”.

Nor can they promise the $10m for the Barcoo and Diamantine fibre optic plan, because that is reliant on a grant application to a regional fund administered by Nationals leader Warren Truss.

Turnbull insists – against obvious local scepticism – that the new satellites will make a big difference, 25 megabits per second download speeds and five Mbps up. “Better than some people in the city get,” he says.

“There is a lot of scepticism about the satellite. I think that is because of the experience with the existing satellite … and people in remote communities won’t have the same potential for effectively unlimited data as you do on fixed line networks but the data allowances will nonetheless be large. It will be transformative and seeing will be believing,” he tells Guardian Australia.

Even in the city electorate visits are gruelling. Local members always squeeze maximum benefit by fitting as many meetings and cups of tea as possible into a minister’s day. In far western Queensland the days are long, whole towns turn out for events and they move with the unhurried pace of the bush. Babies are introduced and everyone wants a chat. And then there are the long flights on the tiny plane in between.

At the end of a day of 800km of travel as he prepares for another event – this time in Longreach – Turnbull reflects on where he has been.

“I’ve never been to this part of Queensland before … Birdsville and the Birdsville track exist in the Australian imagination and history and legend so it is great to have been there.”

He’s also still marvelling at the strange night at the Birdsville pub. “It was hilarious,” he says. “What a great indication of the enormous cultural influence Priscilla, Queen of the Desert has had”.

Most of the people he has been speaking to are more concerned about internet speeds that mean it would take them all day and all night to download the movie, and even then they might not succeed.