Terry Young (Longman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the amendments to the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025. It's hard to believe that in 2026 we're talking about mobile connectivity in this country, a first world country, but, anyway, we are. This has been one of Longman's biggest issues since I was elected in 2019. Longman is one of those unique communities that was once upon a time, when I was growing up anyway, very much a farming community and it slowly has become part of the Brisbane sprawl. A lot of the places where I used to ride a motorbike or where there were dairy farms and things like that are now housing estates, with 300- or 400-square-metre blocks. One of the challenges that that creates, of course, is mobile connectivity.

As the member for Longman, when I first met with the telcos, I said to them, 'Well, what does council say about this?' And to my surprise they said, 'We've never met with council.' I said, 'Well, that sounds a bit ridiculous to me,' so I got on to the local councillor and the town planner and got them in the same room. The town planner went through all the future estates and things. The telco said, 'This is terrific. We should do this more often.' I said, 'Well, there's a new concept—maybe use a bit of common sense. That'd be awesome.' Now they meet reasonably regularly. I have to say, coming from the private sector, I just cannot understand how these meetings weren't taking place previous to me being the member.

I also made sure that the telcos and developers got in the same room because, one of the challenges is when these farms are cut up into these residential blocks. Obviously, there were only six people, a couple of cattle dogs and that's about it that needed a mobile phone and then, all of a sudden, a thousand people are living in that same area. Well, that puts much more of a drain on the system. When they go to build these towers later on, everyone wants a tower but they don't want it next to their house, so people raise all these demands and the council gets all the complaints about it. Of course it's not a council issue; it's a federal issue, so they don't give a toss. They send them over to us and then we have to try and deal with it retrospectively.

When we were in government, I worked hard with the member for Berowra and also the member for Canning, who were in the same boat, being near to Sydney and Perth respectively, on the edge of the urban sprawl and experiencing the same issues.

We know that mobile phones and towers are now privatised in this country. One of the issues with privatisation of critical infrastructure is that the companies that take it on have to make a profit because they answer to shareholders first, unfortunately, before customers. One of the challenges that we have is a telco is not going to build a tower because it probably takes them around about 400 or 500 subscribers in an area to make it worthwhile to build. So in their wisdom, the previous government brought out the Mobile Black Spot Program to help people in regional communities, where they didn't have the population density to make it financially viable for these telcos to build the towers, get towers built. At the end of the day, as governments, we need to make sure that people in the bush are being looked after as much as people in the cities. That's only fair and just.

Unfortunately, this government got rid of that Mobile Black Spot Program. The Peri-Urban Mobile Program—the PUMP as we came to know it—was a bit of a hybrid because these were areas that did have more population than, say, Thargomindah or somewhere like that but they still didn't have enough to warrant the expenditure of a tower for the telcos. So what they did was partially subsidise it. I was able to get three or four towers under the Morrison government. It was an application process and we were able to get four of those. Three of them have been built and there's one more on the go.

The amendments in this bill miss the entire issue of making sure that these towers get built. When a developer buys one of these farms and they put in a development application to change it into a residential community, they cover electricity, they cover roads, they cover sewerage and they cover everything else except for telecommunications.

My solution, and I've been advocating for this for many years now, has always been to make telecommunications part of the DA process, so that when someone comes in to look at a plan of a new housing estate and they're excited—they're normally young couples buying their first home—they look at it and say, 'Yes, we'll take that block there.' If they had the option of knowing that there was going to be a mobile tower built within 100 metres, they could make a decision on whether to buy. They would be fully aware. So, to me, there should be a process in place. We need to make sure that state governments and local governments are including this in the DA process.

I support the intent of the bill, because I want mobile connectivity, but I sincerely doubt we will see any change. I think this will just be another Labor headline and it won't have any substance. But we live in hope.

I've been talking to the telcos and the space industry in this country for years about why we aren't using satellite technology. Now, I'm a layman. I'm not someone who's involved in electronic engineering or telecommunications in a technical way, but I've got eyes and I've got ears. We've got these satellites buzzing around up top, and it made a lot of sense to me, rather than running all these cables and building these towers that are expensive infrastructure and an eyesore. They run into problems where they're knocked over, particularly when there are power outages and when we have natural disasters. All this mobile connectivity goes down because they need power to run these towers. The problem is that the technology is just not there yet. That was the answer I got from the telcos and the space industry.

I was excited, last year, to go to a Telstra event held right here in Parliament House where they talked about satellite connectivity for mobiles. They explained at this event that it was at very, very early stages. It was quite ironic: it was the same week that I had a freak storm go through my electorate. It pretty well wiped out most of Bribie, Toorbul, Beachmere and Donnybrook. The storm affected most of the electorate, but they were the worst hit. Woodford, in particular, was hit hard, because the power that powered the mobile tower had been knocked out. They had no mobile coverage at all for two or three days, which was a real problem. Had we had that satellite technology, they would have at least been able to text.

The telcos are saying that the first lot of technology is going to be simply that: text only. Then, of course, the technology will move on. The second generation will be text and voice, and the last will be when we have the full gambit—when we have text, voice calls, data and internet connectivity. That is probably five to seven years away. One of the challenges that I see with this is that it could give a government that's looking for an excuse not to invest in mobile towers an excuse to say, 'We have this new technology coming,' and then use that as an excuse not to invest in anything at the moment. Well, people need connectivity now.

I have a lot of retirement villages and over-50s lifestyle villages in my electorate, and they're some of the ones that are worst affected, because typically these villages are built out of materials that aren't very good. They actually suppress mobile connectivity, particularly when people put up illegal transmitters, which they do because they want to get transmission. It works fine for them but blocks out their neighbours, so that's a real problem.

A lot of these people have these medical pendants that connect to the mobile network and, if they're having a heart attack or a medical emergency, they push this button. Without any mobile coverage, these pendants don't work. In one case at Living Gems down on Torrens Road in Caboolture, a lady said that she crawled on her hands and knees into the back courtyard so that she could actually use this pendant to get the ambulance. It turns out she was suffering a heart attack. This is 2026; it's mental that people have to go through this stuff.

Again, if it was in the DA process when this retirement village was built that the developer had to put in a mini tower or some sort of mobile tower that would service that community, all this could be abated. All these issues could be gotten rid of. It's about being proactive rather than reactive, which is unusual for government.

The other issue you're going to have is the handset issue we saw when 3G was turned off, which affected so many people. My mum and dad are serial offenders. Dad's 89 and Mum's 84. They've got a phone that Noah used on the ark, and it's useless. It's not a smartphone, but, at the end of the day, they know how to use it. They don't like learning how to use new things, because they're older and they haven't got the time or the patience to do that sort of thing—and that's their right. They had to get rid of their phone because, in the area they were in, sometimes they only had 3G, and—man alive!—my son and my two brothers will testify to the fact that the phone calls we got for the next month while we were trying to help mum figure out her new phone were pretty substantial.

That's going to be one of the problems that we have when this new technology comes in. These satellite phones are going to work only with the latest and greatest handsets, and there's nothing in this bill that talks about assistance to help people who might be on an older handset to upgrade to a new one. Of course, the people who are going to have these older handsets are either the elderly who don't like change or the most vulnerable, who are financially unable to buy the latest and greatest phone for $1,500. So we're actually hurting the most disadvantaged by not having something in this legislation to help these people with this new satellite technology.

Also, the legislation is a little bit ambiguous. It says the telcos must ensure coverage is reasonably available on an equitable basis. You could interpret that in any way you want. That looks like a get-out-of-jail-free card to me. It sounds fair in a free market, but don't make out you're waving a big stick when it's really just a toothpick. There is a really easy way for the telcos to get around this.

I support the intent of the bill and of the amendments moved by the member for Lindsay, and I commend them to the House.

Debate adjourned.

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