Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation) Bill 2014 and the Telecommunications (Industry Levy) Amendment Bill 2014. These bills are part of the repeal-day package and they are very minor reforms—even smaller than the first round in March. In March the changes in the communications portfolio amounted to about $35 million a year—not what you would call big reform. This time the savings amount to about $18 million, which is about half of that size. So the best way to describe these two bills would be that they are small, rudimentary cleaning-up exercise.

Today's bills do a number of things. They abolish TUSMA and transfer its key functions back into the Department of Communications. They repeal outdated provisions in respect of the making of e-marketing industry codes and the supply of telephone sex services. They repeal preselection requirements. They make the registration period for numbers on the Do Not Call Register indefinite. They streamline notice requirements to improve the operation of the customer service guarantee and they enable the TIO to publish documents on the web rather than in the Gazette. The amendments are not contentious and they have the support of industry and consumer representatives.

The Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation) Bill 2014 also repeals the reporting and record-keeping requirements in part 13 of the Telecommunications Act. The opposition does not support that proposal at this time. There is another bill that is currently in the House of Representatives that proposes to deal with the issue of mandatory data retention and w argue that this change should be considered as part of that substantive bill. I have talked to Minister Turnbull about this and asked him to remove this from this bill. He has agreed, and I thank the minister for that. Subject to the government amending this bill to remove schedule 5 in its entirety, we will not oppose this bill in the House. We will of course consider any recommendations that come from the Senate committee that will examine this bill.

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