Tom Venning (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks to the previous speaker for their contribution, but I must say we are not comparing apples with apples. It's well and good to put rules and regulations around existing services, but what happens when those services are getting worse or that service doesn't exist at all? That is the reality faced by too many rural, regional and remote Australians. Let me be clear from the outset: the coalition supports this bill. Frankly, it is overdue. It introduces commonsense changes to an act that has been lagging behind a rapidly evolving market. 'Commonsense' is not a word I would typically use to describe this Labor government, which is unfortunate for the Australian people and for the Aussie battler.

This bill is about visibility, accountability and, importantly, protection. For too long the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA, has been expected to police the playground wearing a blindfold. There are over 1,500 providers currently operating in Australia. ACMA needs to know who they are and what they are doing. At the core of this bill is the creation of a formal registration process. If you want to provide telecommunications services in this country, you must apply to ACMA. Much like in the energy sector, if a provider poses a risk to the public or fails to meet their obligations, the regulator will finally have the power to pull the plug on their licence.

We're also seeing a much-needed hike in penalties. For the big players, a small fine is just the cost of doing business. By raising the maximum fines to $10 million or basing them on a percentage of turnover, we are finally giving the regulator a set of teeth. In the electorate of Grey, which covers over 92 per cent of South Australia, these rules matter. In regional areas, telecommunications aren't a luxury for scrolling through Instagram; they are an essential service. They are the difference between a business surviving or folding. Sometimes, they are the difference between life and death.

Why is this? I'll give you some recent examples. Under the previous coalition government, in the electorate of Grey, 54 mobile cell phone towers were built and installed. Guess how many were installed in the last four years? Zero. Nada. Nothing. Access to telcos is getting worse and worse. While the coalition supports these safeguards, I cannot stand here and just blindly congratulate this Albanese Labor government. It is one thing to tinker with the fine print in a comfortable office; it is quite another to actually provide service to the people in the mid-north, on the west coast, in the outback and, of course, for the Yorke Peninsula, who are having significant issues right now.

Watching the Labor Party manage a telecommunications rollout is a bit like watching a toddler baking a cake. There's a lot of huffing and puffing, but usually they just end up making a mess and expecting someone else to clean it up. They talk a big game about consumer protection in the bill, yet they've overseen the most botched, chaotic and disastrous transition in our history: the 3G shutdown across rural and regional Australia. The minister promised equivalent coverage. Well, I invite the minister to come to a Toyota. Come to Halbury. Come to the blackspot areas of my electorate and tell farmers that the silence on their handsets is equivalent.

While Labor pat themselves on the back for increasing fines, my constituents are paying—surprise, surprise—another Labor tax. But, this time, the tax isn't coming from the ATO. It is a tax because the 4G rollout wasn't finished before 3G was pulled. This means families are forced to fork out thousands for Starlink or expensive boosters just to get the basic signal they used to have for free. This is a tax based on postcode, yet our PM said he would govern for all Australians. They talk a big game on regional, rural and remote Australia, but their actions are the absolute opposite. It's the amount of money ripped out of rural and outback roads, particularly in outback South Australia. The lack of access to GP services, child care and aged care in regional SA is terrible. We have the worst health outcomes in the state. We have the lowest access to child care in the state. If you're ageing, you can't age in your local aged-care home; you've got to move hours away. And, of course, there are the telcos, with 54 towers in nine years versus zero in four years. The numbers speak for themselves.

Take Craig, a farmer on the Eyre Peninsula. Craig is trying to run a livestock business. He told me he had to give up ordering transport to move loads of sheep because he simply cannot get a signal. Imagine trying to run a farming business in 2026 where you can't even call a truckie to pick up your stock! That's Labor's connected Australia for you.

Then there's my good friend Lucas Bagshaw. Lucas faced every country person's nightmare this past harvest: a fire on his property. He grabbed his phone to call for help—nothing, no signal. He knew better than to rely on triple zero because in regional SA it is a roll of the dice. Lucas went through 3,000 litres of water before his neighbours, who only saw the smoke by luck, arrived to help. They lost a header—headers these days cost about $1.8 million—a baler and kilometres of fencing. If that signal had been there, the CFS could have been there sooner, and they might not have lost the header, the baler and the fencing.

I also think of Keith, a farmer from the mid-north who recently crashed his quad bike. He lay there for hours. He wasn't saved by 4G or a government safeguard. He was saved because he used a UHF radio and someone heard his call for help. I don't think anyone from Labor or the Greens knows what a UHF is, yet it has been a lifesaver for me and my family on our farm and for so many others in rural, regional and remote South Australia.

And then there are seniors. In Orroroo I spoke with David. His wife was forced to buy a new phone because her two-year-old Samsung could no longer access triple zero after the shutdown. They are pensioners. They can't just nip out and drop a thousand bucks on a new phone. In Streaky Bay, Rebecca has been calling because the internet and mobile coverage for the whole town just dropped out for three days during a severe heatwave with fire warnings. Imagine if the internet dropped out here in Parliament House for three days! Think about that: a heatwave, a fire threat and a total communications blackout.

Then there is Tarcowie in the mid-north of my electorate, a productive farming district where the silence of the phone lines is deafening and where the lack of connectivity is no longer just an inconvenience; it is a genuine threat to livelihoods. This issue is so significant that the Stock Journal has written an entire story, an expose, on this town and its troubling communications issues. The residents of Tarcowie are not in the outback; they're in a vital agricultural corridor. As local farmer Noreen Arthur puts it: 'We're not in the outback, but you wouldn't know it by the phone service.'

The situation in Tarcowie is dire. In 2024 alone, three residents died while working or living alone in the district. In these tragic circumstances, the limited mobile reception was cited as a major concern for emergency response. This is the brutal reality of the digital divide. When seconds count, Tarcowie residents are left searching for a signal. Residents are forced to walk outside in all weather or travel to the local golf club, one of the few spots with a booster, just to make a simple phone call. This is undignified, unsafe and, frankly, not acceptable. What makes the situation truly bitter for the community is the presence of what I can only describe as a ghost town—a Telstra facility standing just five kilometres out of town, installed nearly two years ago. Residents watched it go up believing help was on the way, yet the transmitter has never been switched on. Telstra now claims that this structure is merely a network facility for a tower nine kilometres away in Pekina. You cannot explain technicalities to a community that can see the infrastructure with their own eyes but cannot make a call.

The botched 3G switch-off has only compounded the misery. Residents report that since the transition to 4G and 5G, coverage has deteriorated. Calls are garbled and families are forced to rely on wi-fi calls, making calls within their own homes. This incompetence is strangling local enterprise. Take Tarcowie Transport, run by Joe and his partner, Taylor. Joe moves around a hundred loads in a season. He needs to coordinate with clients and contractors constantly, yet, in most paddocks, there is no service. If you break down, you're stranded—or you've still got that UHF radio.

When the signal drops, productivity stops—

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