Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025, and, in doing so, I very much acknowledge the work of the Minister for Communications, who is doing an incredible job in what is a very difficult and essential portfolio in an industry which is wracked with problems and which, really, I think has been allowed to get away with some unconscionable conduct. It is a credit to the minister that this bill forms a part of that general approach to fixing that essential service, and I very much think that she's really doing a fantastic job. In fact, she's far more diplomatic than I would be when talking about some of these telcos. I'll use her words, just in case I get a bit intemperate myself. She said:

The Triple Zero failures last year shook public confidence.

Frankly, they exposed elements of a system that relied on a best efforts approach, and sadly, in some instances, those efforts were far from the best.

At a deeper level, it exposed a discordance between how the industry is regulated, and perhaps how it sees itself, versus how the public expects it to operate.

I am sure we all have constituents for whom and suburbs in our electorates in which the telcos are not operating as the public would expect them to operate. I think that this bill sits well within the Albanese government's approach to making sure that all Australians are connected, wherever they live.

Allow me to reflect on the bill that sat alongside this one, which was the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025, which is dealing with telecommunications in regional and outback Australia, an area that I'm familiar with. It is an area where communications for me, in the year 2000, involved strapping a yellow rubber Garmin GPS to my motorbike so I could know where I was. You can imagine that having grown up in town, in Broken Hill, and coming onto a property in my 20s, I was no bushman, and I very much relied on the technology, I think, to get me out of there alive. It was very simple. It was a little green screen with an arrow that would point to the homestead or the tank or wherever we were going. But it connected to a satellite. That communication device was familiar to people out in some of those places in the year 2000, while mobile phones were completely unfamiliar to people out there. It was things like that that really provided that economic benefit and opened up those economic opportunities.

By the way—without digressing too far—it's amazing to see how far telecommunications has come now, with the idea that stock can be mustered by essentially wearing a collar that gives a sort of gentle vibration to steer them in the right direction. The future of communications is really quite amazing when it comes to what the potential for agriculture is. So it was that people in the city had no idea what GPS was at the same time that we had no idea what a mobile phone was. But those methods of communication have come together and are vitally important now to our economy.

But, of course, it is not just an economic imperative or convenience that there are good communications. I'm reminded of my mother's experience in the flood of 2010 in Brisbane—the first big flood, something that, unfortunately, we've become all too familiar with. In 2010, she lived in the suburb of Oxley, and her very modest house was flooded. Apart from the dislocation that, of course, that caused, the communication systems went down, and there was this moment of fear with my family not being able to get in touch with her. It was a fear which had spread through the whole community, with people not being able to get in touch with family members. A friend of mine who had escaped the Yugoslav war of the mid-nineties said that being without those communications was exactly what it was like to be in a war zone. So it is not just that there is, as I say, that economic imperative and that convenience that we think it is. It is also to give that human connection, which is ever more important as families and communities become diffuse.

It is not only in the outback and not only in times of natural disaster. It is really inconceivable that today, in well-established suburbs in my electorate like Eagleby, where there's a retirement village whose residents are constantly talking to me about the lack of service that they have on their mobile phones, and Cornubia, which has been there for as long as I've been alive, they can't get decent mobile phone service, let alone some of those newer areas like Holmview and Boronia Heights. I was out in Upper Coomera the other day, trying to get connection on my phone to navigate through the maps. I had better GPS services literally out the back of Bourke than I had in Upper Coomera. In some ways, I'm not sure whether it's more inexcusable that they haven't got the services in a well-established suburb or that they haven't got the services in a new suburb, where it should have been obvious to them that these houses were going to move in and it should have been easier for them to get hold of the land and get the approvals that they needed to set up the towers and other infrastructure in order to provide their service. And so it is that we are going to run a campaign locally to try and get the telcos to come to the party and to work collaboratively with them.

Shortly, we're going to be launching a survey to try and find out exactly where the black spots are, because it is typical also of the way that the telcos operate that they have one set of data that shows that everything is fine but actually doesn't reflect the experience of people on the ground. We're going to do their job for them and find where these black spots are. We've got a pretty good idea as it is, but we want to see how widespread they are, and then we intend to work collaboratively with the telcos. We're going to have a public meeting to really try and get some momentum behind this campaign.

We're going to work collaboratively with them and with the authorities to try and get a solution, because ultimately that's what people want. They want a solution. They don't want blame to be thrown around, although there is plenty of blame which could be apportioned to these telcos. Someone said to me that perhaps they should only pay for the number of bars that they have of a service. If there's one out of five bars, then they should only pay one-fifth of their bill. Ultimately, though, it is not about the blame, but there is a good bit of blame to go around. The way that these telcos have really thumbed their noses at the Australian consumers is really, in some cases, unconscionable.

The very well respected Allan Fels pointed out that Optus—and I don't want to single out Optus, because it's a big list of telcos that have not lived up to their obligations—had three strikes there, with two notable and tragic outages of their triple zero network. But, also, it's about the way they behaved—something that I referred to earlier, and the member for Griffith has to sit through this again, but it's a story well worth telling—when the ACCC took Optus to court because they had been selling expensive phones and expensive plans to vulnerable people, obviously disabled people and people with severe learning difficulties. They sold, effectively, junk products because Optus hadn't even bothered to check whether they could actually cover them in the regions in which they lived. It was only when it was exposed that Optus ended up doing what it thought was the right thing, but it copped a $100 million penalty for that behaviour, which, incidentally, is only because this government has been properly resourcing ACCC and giving it those enforcement powers that had been so lacking under the previous government. It had managed to take Optus to court and get that $100 million penalty which, hopefully, deters the behaviour of not only Optus but also other providers as well.

Ultimately, as this debate sits within the government's broader economic objectives of keeping the cost of living down, if we can keep these services and level the playing field to improve competition and improve consumer safety—particularly with the telcos, which are an essential service—that's one approach to lowering the cost of living.

But it's not just Optus. I feel like I should spread a little bit of it around. Exetel, a company that purports to be one of the fastest internet providers in the country, has also dropped the ball. Effectively, it was identified that there were 63 cases where it had allowed SIM swapping, which is where the scammer gets hold of somebody's mobile phone and then is able to control their phone number, get all their passwords and get all the codes in order to access their account. Those people lost over $412,000 because of the incompetence of Exetel. They copped a $700,000 fine.

To share it around a little bit, there's another company, Circles Australia—which, incidentally, is a company I've heard of only because my son chooses to use it. It was fined $413,000 after failing to verify the identity of 26 customers whose mobile services were abused by scammers who stole at least $45,000. It was the telco's second such penalty. There is a long list of bad behaviours which have been allowed to flourish—

Debate interrupted.

See this speech in context