Andrew Willcox (Dawson, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Sovereign Capability) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025. Let me say from the outset, the coalition took a telecommunications universal service obligation to the last election. Essentially, that means that the service for telecommunications and data would be the same for city people as what's delivered to country people. That seems pretty fair and reasonable, particularly given what rural and regional Australia contributes to the overall economy, doesn't it? Let's look at what they do contribute. All the food and fibre is grown out in rural and regional Australia, all the mining royalties are generated in regional Australia and over $1 billion in coalmining is generated out in the regions, so it should be pretty fair for the regional and rural areas to get the same amount of telecommunications as the city.

It is the same with our little towns. Young ladies like the member opposite might not know what a home phone is because they're lucky to be young enough to know that everyone carries around a mobile. Whereas in the little town of Bowen that I live in, a lot of people still rely on the old home phone but all the networks just do not work, so they're forced to go to mobile phones. But unfortunately, again, because it's a small town, they just don't have the reception. I hear people in the cities talk about black spots, saying, 'Oh, there are black spots. You know, I was driving along and I came to a traffic light and then I couldn't get service.' Well, here's a news flash: in places like where I live, we don't worry about black spots; we have no spots at all.

People in my area haven't gone mad. A person would be driving along when, all of a sudden, they pull up, jump out and they're on the front of their car or on their bull bar, looking for a signal, or jumping up on the back of the ute, looking around, just to try to ring somebody. It's absolutely ridiculous. That's why we need to have a universal service obligation and provide the same level of service to the bush. On our dirt roads a little bit further off the highway, you see a similar thing. You see people in a cloud of dust pull over off the highway and take off into the scrub. They haven't got caught short and are off to the bathroom; they're racing to get on top of a pile of deco or to climb a tree or to find any little hill they can just to look for a phone service.

To highlight this, where I live in Bowen, my electoral office is about 2½ hours' drive away. On the trip from Bowen to Mackay my phone drops out seven times. When you spend a lot of time in the car like I do—I do about 60,000km a year—driving is unproductive, so it's always good to be on the phone and doing some work as I go. We really need to improve that. If there was an accident, if something was to happen, the fact that you can't dial triple zero when it suits is a safety issue.

But this isn't just in the rural areas. My biggest area is Mackay, a city of over 100,000 people. A suburb of Mackay called Slade Point is very close to the city but has very poor mobile phone coverage. If you have a look at a little seaside community like Cungulla, there's absolutely no coverage there at all. Some of our telcos say, 'Well, you know, put in some satellites, put some extra things in,' but that's all money, and people just don't have the money in this current cost-of-living crisis.

My electorate of Dawson is massive. It's a sprawling powerhouse of our national economy. It stretches over 400km from the heart of Mackay through to the sugar heartlands of the Burdekin, right through to the southern reaches of Townsville. But in the 21st century, it's a disgrace that travelling this region is like navigating a cosmic void. When I drive the 400-kilometre stretch, which I do very regularly, I can tell you there are more black holes in the mobile coverage around Dawson than there are holes in a pincushion. Alarmingly, along the Bruce Highway—the main arterial route, I might add, the very spine of the great state of Queensland—there are regular and dangerous black spots. This isn't the remote outback we're talking about; this is the national land transportation network. This is how our kids get to school. This is how our farmers get their produce to market. This is how people get their supplies up from the city. This is how families take their kids to sport on weekends. This is how our patients go to hospital. It's a must, but then they don't have any phone reception, or they have sparse phone reception, as they drive that highway.

As a result of this government's negligence on any meaningful Bruce Highway investment, combined with a total lack of foresight on our telecommunications network, we're then left with a recipe for disaster. What happens when there's a serious accident on a stretch of the Bruce where there is net zero coverage? The answer is simple, but it's brutal: you have deaths. There is an ultimate human cost to this lack of investment. When a family is trapped in a car or a truckie is in a critical state in his cabin and there is no service on the phone to call for help, minutes turn into tragedies. That is the reality for regional Queensland under this government. While the inner-city elites worry about a dropped call being a minor inconvenience, to my constituents it can be a matter of life and death.

We're here today to discuss the universal mobile obligation. The coalition supports the goal of extending voice and text coverage outdoors across more of the country. Improved connectivity for regional Australians is critical and very, very important. However, the credibility of any reform rests not on the lofty aspirations of the minister proclaiming what he does in a press release. It needs to be on the detail, the realism and the actual implications on the ground. This bill must be deeply scrutinised, because if there's one thing we know about this government it's that they're the masters of the headline but they're not very good on the delivery.

In 21st century Australia, reliable phone coverage is not a lifestyle extra or a consumer perk; it's a foundational national need. It underpins our relationships, our economic activity and, most importantly, our safety. For the small businesses, the farmers and the freight operators in Dawson, reliable mobile coverage is essential to the running of their day-to-day operations. It's how they coordinate their logistics. It's how they respond to changing conditions in the paddock. It's how they keep their workers safe. For families separated by the vast distances of our region, it's the only way they can stay connected. Australia's geography makes connectivity both more challenging and also more important. New technologies provide an exciting opportunity to bridge these gaps, but they must be matched by a framework that delivers genuine reliability, not just hollow promises.

The objective of this bill must be to actually deliver. Measures claimed to improve connectivity must work in the real world. We need a framework that is practical, reliable and affordable. An obligation must be clearly defined so that carriers understand what is required of them and consumers in places like Kelsey Creek or Gumlu understand exactly what they're getting for their money. Terms like 'reasonably available' or 'equitable access' are lawyer speak. They must be translated into measurable, enforceable standards. Without clarity and a strong compliance framework there is a massive risk that this obligation will be impossible to monitor or even harder to enforce. Australians deserve more than an ambitious headline. They deserve a framework that stands up under the harsh light of regional reality.

This bill leans heavily on direct-to-device satellite technology. This is an exciting development. It has the potential to reduce longstanding coverage gaps across the vast regions of Australia. But let's be very clear: it remains developing technology. Global rollout is still underway, and significant technical and commercial variabilities are yet to be settled. Accelerating the rollout is essential, but legislating an outcome does not magically deliver it. You can't simply wave a magic wand in Canberra and expect the satellite to fix a black spot on a Whitsunday island tomorrow.

The legislation leaves a trail of unanswered questions. Our domestic carriers may bear the primary regulatory burden, but they will depend heavily on international satellite providers, whose pricing models and deployment schedules are outside Australia's control. We must ensure that any new obligation strengthens market competition rather than inadvertently handing monopoly to a few global giants.

Even more concerning is the issue of device capability. An outdoor coverage obligation is only meaningful if the phone in your pocket can actually connect to the service. Many of the handsets currently in use were never designed with satellite connectivity in mind. Regional Australians, older Australians and our small-business owners often keep their devices for longer periods of time. They don't want to run out and buy the latest $2,000 smartphone every 12 months. A reform that functions only on the latest high-end handsets would undermine the very principle of equitable access that this bill claims to advance. Emergency triple zero access, in particular, must never be contingent on owning a premium handset.

We've learnt the hard lessons from the government's failed—botched—rollback of the 3G set-up. The 3G set-up was cut off. How the set-up worked from your tower was that 3G would project a long way so you would get a lot of coverage in the distance between your tower and where you were, but the service wasn't quite as good. When you go to 4G, it won't project as far, but the service and the quality is better—and 5G doesn't project as far but is very, very high quality. What needs to happen, until the satellite service becomes available, is that more towers need to be built. That is because, even though there's higher quality of service if you're close to a tower, if you're not, your service is vastly diminished or not available at all.

That was a foreseeable transaction that required meticulous coordination and instead was characterised by confusion, technical glitches and total incompetence. Hundreds of device models were found to be incompatible, and many Australians only discovered the problem when their service simply stopped working. Consumers were forced into unplanned, expensive upgrades. That wasn't an unforeseeable event; it was a management failure. We cannot repeat the performance with our satellite network.

Communications policy is not a theoretical exercise for academics in Canberra. It has direct consequences for the wellbeing of every Australian. Australians expect and deserve that, when they dial triple zero, their call will connect without hesitation or any technical complications. The recent history of triple zero outages and device compatibility issues have shaken public confidence in the system. Senate inquiries have exposed troubling governance shortcomings and massive gaps in oversight. The tragic loss of two Australians following device incompatibility issues underscores a sobering fact: communications failures are not merely technical glitches; they are matters of life and death. There is absolutely zero tolerance for error when it comes to emergency services connectivity. We need ironclad assurance that the systems put in place by this bill will not leave Australians with older handsets vulnerable and left behind. We cannot afford another botched rollout.

Then there is the issue of affordability. Telecommunications costs are a critical issue. If compliance with this new obligation significantly increases costs, then that is not a good outcome. We want to have communications for every Australian.

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