Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025. The bill is welcome, but the circumstances in which it has been introduced are definitely not. This urgent bill responds to yet another catastrophic triple 0 Optus outage. In the past two weeks, Australians have experienced two serious Optus outages, leaving customers without coverage for hours at a time. Hundreds of calls failed to go through, and, tragically, at least three deaths have been linked to people unable to reach emergency services. No greater failure could be linked to any telecommunications company than that.

Australians should be confident that when they dial triple 0 the call will go through, but right now Australians can't hold that confidence. The Australian people are looking not only for answers but also for action. Ultimately it is the government's and the minister's responsibility to ensure that laws are applied to our telecommunications providers, and clearly the laws are failing in serious ways, and that is completely unacceptable. When one system fails, like Optus did here, your phone is meant to connect to another network. Now, we don't yet know why that didn't happen. This need for backup systems is also why roaming during emergencies is essential. If Optus goes down during a bushfire or because of an outage, Telstra or another carrier must be able to pick up the call, allowing people to access emergency information or, critically, make a life-saving triple 0 call. I'll return to this later.

Unfortunately, we've been here before. When ACMA, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, conducted an investigation into the nationwide Optus outage in 2023 it found that 2,145 people could not access triple 0 and that 369 welfare checks were not conducted. Optus paid penalties totalling more than $12 million, although I have to say—and I say this very strongly—that this is an absolutely insignificant amount of money for a multibillion-dollar corporation, and I would support any move to make that penalty much stronger.

Following the 2023 outage, the government appointed the former deputy chair of ACMA to conduct an inquiry into the outage, which resulted in 18 recommendations to address structural issues in the emergency call system, known as the Bean review. The review's key recommendations were to share real-time outage information across stakeholders and to establish a Triple Zero Custodian to set standards and compel cooperation. As we know, the government accepted all 18 recommendations in April 2024. But here we are, 18 months later, and several remain to be fully implemented.

Following the last absolutely unacceptable outage, the minister has moved to fast-track the establishment of the Triple Zero Custodian in the legislation that we have before us and to give ACMA new powers to hold the telcos to account. Of course I welcome this, and I welcome this bill, and I will support its passage through the House. But I criticise the government most strongly for its slow implementation of key outstanding Bean review recommendations.

This bill amends the Telecommunications (Consumer Protection and Service Standards) Act 1999 to establish a permanent Triple Zero Custodian within the government. The custodian will have powers to request that ACMA direct industry in relation to the emergency call system. The aim is to clearly establish the custodian as the end-to-end oversight body of the emergency call system. First, the bill gives ACMA powers to compel carriers, carriage service providers and emergency call system actors to disclose detailed information about an incident, including the cause of a failure, which services and regions are affected, restoration time frames and its communications to the public. If the custodian requests action, ACMA must issue direction within a set time frame and provide the information and analysis back to the custodian. These are binding directions, with civil penalties available for noncompliance.

Third, the bill sets out how information gathered under these powers can be used and shared. The custodian and ACMA can share relevant information with emergency services and with the National Emergency Management Agency—importantly—as well as with state authorities and others to help respond to outages or improve the system. And fourth, the bill requires ACMA to provide biannual reports to the minister on the actions it's taken in relation to emergency call systems and the Triple Zero Custodian. The bill will also enable the minister to launch a review into the effectiveness of the new custodian arrangements in two years time.

I support this bill because recent Optus outages have shown all Australians just how fragile our telecommunications systems can be and how quickly this fragility can put lives at risk when things go wrong. But let's be clear. This bill will help, but it won't fix this problem. Ensuring our telecommunications systems are resilient and futureproof will require much more action by this government, and I will be relentless in holding them to account for this, because, unfortunately, this fragility is something people in regional Australia know far too well. We already live with outages during storms, bushfires and floods. Communities in my electorate of Indi know exactly how dangerous it is to be cut off, whether it's for an hour, for a day or, in some circumstances, even for a week.

That's why I've been fighting for a more resilient system since I was first elected in 2019. People deserve confidence that, when disaster strikes, their phones will work, their call will get through and their community will stay connected. During an emergency, this is doubly true. While good communications can save lives, bad communications can cost lives. Unfortunately, Indi's heightened disaster risk means that communication outages are frequent. Indi is mountainous, heavily forested and prone to widespread and devastating bushfires. We were devastated both in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires and again in the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. North-east Victoria is also susceptible to riverine and flash floods, with major river systems such as the Murray, the Goulburn, the King, the Ovens, the Broken and the Yea rivers traversing the electorate. In towns like Wangaratta, Yea and Benalla, floods are a fact of life.

During the Black Saturday and Black Summer bushfires, people's safety and survival often depended on whether a phone call got through to triple 0 or whether an emergency warning reached them in time, and this was true for Grant and Alice Stinear, who gave me significant evidence during the recent RTIRC review last year. They live in Buxton in the south of my electorate, and they credit their landline for saving their lives during the Black Saturday bushfires 15 years ago. When the mobile network had gone down, and with the fire fast approaching, it was through their landline that the call to evacuate got through. But today their landline has fallen completely into disrepair. They have little confidence their mobiles will work during a bushfire, and they told my office that, despite all the technological progress of the last decade, the Stinears are less confident than they were 15 years ago that a life-saving message will reach them when it's most needed. What a failure of government!

This is a widely felt sentiment in Indi. No matter where I go across the 29,000 square kilometres of my electorate, I hear loud and clear from the community that regional telecommunications are inadequate, particularly during emergencies. Recent outages like those caused by Optus only reinforce this belief. When outages do occur, backup generators and batteries aren't lasting long enough. It's why in the 2025 election I put forward a policy to require at least 24 hours of power backup for all mobile towers in high-risk areas. This is so important because, when mobile phone towers don't have sufficient power backup, entire towns become isolated. People can't contact emergency services, nor can they contact each other, and I will continue to call on the government to implement this policy. It's a no-brainer. It's been costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office at around $159 million to provide potentially life-saving upgrades to 3,200 high-risk sites. Get on and do it.

It's why I fought for communities in my electorate affected by the 3G shutdown who saw their connectivity go backwards. It's completely unacceptable. It's why I support the universal outdoor mobile obligation, which has the potential to make universal mobile access for Australians a reality. I've supported the government's trials of voice services through the low-Earth-orbit satellites, including tests at the alpine resort of Falls Creek in my electorate. It's why I'm pushing for further funding for projects that increase local communications resilience. Community energy nodes and public wi-fi projects are already benefiting towns such as Jamieson in my electorate, and additional funding for such initiatives will support life-saving communication and essential economic activity during prolonged outages. It's why I've been calling for temporary disaster roaming as a priority reform, and I'm not the only one. It was recommended by the Senate's 2023 Connecting the country report and by the ACCC's 2023 Regional Mobile Infrastructure Inquiry. The Bean review recommended that any temporary disaster roaming must be expanded even further to include outages such as those recently caused by Optus. How many inquiries—how many recommendations—before we get the action?

In my own 2024 submission to the Regional Telecommunications Review, I called for disaster roaming before the next severe fire season, which, at the time, was before the end of 2024. Well, here we are, about to walk into our next bushfire season with no sign of this reform. There has been no public update for two years. Fire season—I cannot emphasise this enough—is fast approaching, and it is completely unacceptable, because an emergency roaming system is commonsense. It is the solution of commonsense for remote, mountainous regions like Indi and for regional communities right across Australia. It would enable a phone to connect to any network during an emergency, no matter which telco you are with.

We know that temporary disaster roaming is possible. In the United States, the Mandatory Disaster Response Initiative requires carriers to let customers roam onto another network during declared disasters. Those powers were activated during Tropical Storm Debby and Hurricane Helene in the second half of 2024. This can be done. In Chile, the national automatic roaming system requires telcos to share their networks in remote regions so people can make calls and receive essential information no matter their provider. So why not Australia? In Canada, the government required telecommunications providers to sign an agreement that facilitates emergency roaming and mutual aid during disasters and major network outages. That's not Australia. Frankly, it is not acceptable that in Australia—in our country—in 2025, your choice of mobile provider determines whether you can access emergency information during a natural disaster.

Are we satisfied with this? I sure as heck am not satisfied with this. The VicEmergency app, for example, relies on a mobile data connection, and we must have access to it during a disaster. During a bushfire or storm, regional Australians need to be able to make a call through whatever network is available, not the one they're signed up to. Parents need to know a call will get through to their child if they're apart. When I asked the current Minister for Communications about this crucial reform this week in question time, we were told that simulation drills would occur in the coming weeks. Well, that's a welcome update, but there is no time left to stall, because, folks, this is not a drill. This is real. We have been stalling in this country for more than two years since these reviews. The government have been stalling. We need to get on with this. It can no longer be the case that you just choose your own adventure if you're a telco. The government must compel the telcos to deploy disaster roaming as soon as possible. My communities can't accept further delays and neither can I.

The bill before the House will improve the functioning of the emergency call system, and on that basis I welcome it. Australians do not have confidence in the triple 0 system, and this must change. It is unacceptable, and both the government and the telcos are responsible. The government must move quicker to implement the key recommendations of the Bean review, including temporary disaster roaming. Other countries have done it; we must do it too. We can't lag any more. I commend the member for Mallee for the amendments she's about to put before the House. I will be supporting them. We all need to step up here but no-one more than the telecommunications companies and this government. Stop making excuses, and stop making Australia some kind of exceptional circumstance and risking our lives.

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