Simon Kennedy (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In modern Australia, reliable mobile phone coverage is not a luxury, it's not an optional extra and it's not a lifestyle perk. It's foundational national infrastructure. Just as our roads connect our communities physically, telecommunications connect them digitally. In 2026, these digital connections underpin our economy, they underpin our social cohesion and, critically, they underpin our safety. Australians don't measure connectivity in legislative clauses—surprise, surprise. They measure it when their call connects, they measure it when the EFTPOS machine works, they measure it when they can check emergency warnings and they measure it when triple zero answers when they dial.

Recently, Rayna, a constituent in my electorate, wrote to me expressing her frustration. She said the lack of mobile phone coverage on the Cronulla-to-city line is terrible, and getting worse daily. It's not only Woolooware and Kirrawee with no service, but also Sutherland. This is one of Sydney's and one of Australia's busiest rail corridors. Thousands of Australians travel this line every single day to work, to study, to run businesses and to support their families. And yet, connectivity is deteriorating.

I reached out to the Minister for Communications regarding mobile coverage connectivity affecting the commuters travelling between Cronulla and the city. The minister's response was that providing in-carriage coverage presents challenges, partly due to the complexities involved in obtaining approvals and building new mobile base station infrastructure within a rail corridor. Well, for one of the busiest railway lines in Australia, this is simply not good enough. It's not good enough from the government, it's not good enough from Telstra, it's not good enough from Optus and it's not good enough from Vodafone. The minister noted these obstacles can deter and are deterring mobile network operators and infrastructure providers from focusing on the train line from Cronulla to the city. This response tells us something important: red tape and slow approval processes are crippling this country. It's hurting our economy and it's hurting our telecommunications infrastructure.

Infrastructure providers face layers of regulatory complexity before they can even begin to start improving service. And while bureaucratic processes grind slowly forward, ordinary Australians in Kirrawee, in Lilli Pilli, in Sutherland and in Miranda are missing out. If red tape and delayed approvals are discouraging investment in suburban Sydney, I can only begin to imagine the challenges my colleagues are facing in regional Australia. And this doesn't stop at the rail corridor in my electorate. Residents in Kirrawee and Lilli Pilli continue to report persistent mobile black spots. This isn't remote farmland. This isn't remote regional Australia. These are established suburban communities in the heart of Sydney.

These suburbs also face significant bushfire risks. Residents have previously had homes burn down in bushfires. In Kirrawee, in Lilli Pilli and in other bushfire prone areas, connectivity is not about convenience. It's about emergency alerts. It's about contacting your neighbours, contacting your loved ones, contacting your insurers. It's about calling for help if evacuation routes are cut off. If coverage drops during a fast-moving fire front, this isn't an inconvenience, it's a serious safety vulnerability. In inner city suburbs, a dropped call is frustrating. In bushfire prone communities like Kirrawee or Lilli Pilli, it can be dangerous and it can be life threatening. This is why communications policy must be treated as essential infrastructure policy.

The coalition supports the goal of extending voice and text coverage outdoors and across more of the country. This is because improved connectivity for Australians is simply the fair thing to do. We need it in our cities and we need it in our regions. The credibility of any reform rests not on the aspiration it proclaims but on the detail it contains and the realism of its implementation. But this obligation must be clearly defined.

Carriers must understand precisely what is required, precisely the dead spots they are fixing and precisely how to do it. Consumers must understand what they are entitled to expect—and they should expect. They should not have to deal with dead spots in the heart of the Sutherland Shire, a community that is inhabited by over 250,000 residents.

Regulators must have measurable standards to assess the compliance of these infrastructure providers and telecommunications companies. If phrases such as 'reasonably available' or 'equitable access' are left vague, enforcement becomes difficult, if not impossible, for these regulators; and, if enforcement are weak or approvals are slow and mired in red tape, delivery will stall and we'll continue to face outages like we do on the Cronulla-to-Central line.

The experience on the Cronulla line demonstrates that complexity and delay in infrastructure approvals deter investment. This cannot become the model for a nationwide obligation. Australians deserve clarity, timeliness and mobile phone connection in bushfire-prone areas and in critical areas like a train line, where you have many safety risks, whether they be accidents at stations, potential problems with the train or potential problems with the track.

Direct-to-satellite services offer enormous potential to reduce coverage gaps across the country in regional areas and cities, but much of this technology remains emerging or remains costly. Domestic carriers may bear the primary regulatory burden, but they're going to depend heavily on international satellite providers whose pricing models and deployment schedules are outside of Australia's direct control and often our regulatory reach.

Legislating an outcome does not guarantee delivery. It also does not guarantee affordability. And it does not remove the domestic regulatory bottlenecks that slow down tower builds and infrastructure deployment that the minister said is plaguing the Sutherland Shire and the Cronulla-to-city line. If we're serious about improving coverage, we must address not only technology but also the regulatory barriers that slow down infrastructure. We must deregulate this economy. We must deregulate infrastructure, housing and telecommunications and improve the productivity of this country.

Right now we have a GDP cap of about two per cent. For any growth over two per cent, we will see inflation. This is why homeowners right across Australia, right across the Sutherland Shire, are facing inflation and facing interest rate rises—because we have this productivity cap. Unless we go on a red tape and deregulation busting mission, we will continue to have this cap on our economy. Australians will continue to pay higher interest rates; they will continue to lose money to inflation as prices of goods go higher than their wages; and, importantly, they will continue to have a slower than needed rollout of telecommunications infrastructure.

The outdoor coverage obligation is only meaningful if Australia's devices can connect to the promised service. A reform that functions for only the latest high-end smartphones would undermine the very principle of equitable access it claims to provide. We saw what happened with the 3G shutdown. Hundreds of devices were incompatible. Australians discovered these problems only after the services stopped working. Businesses were disrupted. Consumers faced unplanned upgrades. Emergency access must never depend on owning a new device, and it must never catch consumers by surprise. The recent history of triple zero outages, where there were deaths, sadly, and emerging device compatibility issues have shaken public confidence in this government and in this system. There should be no tolerance for error when it comes to emergency services connectivity. Australians expect that much, and it is just that they do.

Telecommunications affordability continues to remain critical. In a cost-of-living crisis, as people are struggling to make ends meet, we've had an interest rate rise and we're facing many more. We know the RBA is planning in their modelling for at least two or three more interest rate rises, heaping pressure on households in my electorate. Just recently I met a mother in Sans Souci who had to give up her house because she could not keep up with the interest rate repayments. There have been 13 interest rate repayment rises for her household, and it's putting pressure on her telecommunications bill. It's putting pressure on her trying to own the latest device.

It's not just constituents in Sans Souci and my electorate who are facing this. Regional Australians already also face higher service costs and fewer competitive options. A universal service obligation must not translate into higher bills for those it's intended to support and never more so than in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis where mortgages are going through the roof, energy prices are going through the roof and, as inflation ravages the household budget, the cost of everything is going up, while wages remain stagnant. It's essential that any new telecommunications obligation strengthens market competition rather than inadvertently consolidating power in the hands of a few.

Telecommunications deregulation has been one of the successes of this country. Taking Telstra and telecommunications services out of government hands and putting them into the private sector has meant they can innovate. They can innovate new technologies like Starlink and the iPhone. We should take the example of the telecommunications industry and apply it to other areas of essential infrastructure, such as housing and transport. We have seen numerous advances in telecommunications and what you can do on a mobile phone today. But when we look at these other industries dominated by government regulation, be it housing, roads or public transport, we have little innovation. We actually have declining productivity in housing. It's going backwards despite all the technology. Despite AI, automation and robots, somehow our construction industry is going backwards. Well, let's learn from the telecommunications industry now.

Sadly, we have had this construction malaise starting to reinfect the telecommunications industry. I wrote to the telecommunications minister asking for help for my constituents in urban Sydney trying to get to work while trying to use their mobile phones and being unable to do so in Australia's most populous city. In one of the biggest, busiest and most advanced cities in the world, they cannot access mobile phone reception in metro Sydney. It's disgraceful and we've had enough. We're drawing the line in the sand now and we will say, 'No more.'

The coalition believes in expanding connectivity and embracing these new technologies that can close these longstanding service gaps for the residents of Lilli Pilli, the residents of Kirrawee and the commuters of those train lines. The coalition have an enviable record of investing in regional connectivity because we've led it. Labor cannot hold a candle to our record on investing in regional connectivity. We've backed programs that deliver practical improvements on the ground in regions and in the metros. This is why the coalition spearheaded the Mobile Black Spot Program, a program that worked across all the electorates in Australia, laser focused on improving mobile black spots. We need to resuscitate that program. We need another program. We need this Labor government to copy the former Liberal government's black spot program and start filling the black spots in Kirrawee, Cronulla and that line.

Reform must be grounded in technical realism, economic responsibility and rigorous oversight. I support the intention of this bill. It is good legislation, and we do need to close these mobile blackspots, but the devil will be in the detail and in the implementation. Australians and residents of the Sutherland Shire should not have to put up with blackspots as they go from their train to their work in the middle of downtown Sydney.

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