Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It probably comes as a surprise to people that, during a sitting week, this building will house between 4,000 and 5,000 people. It's a phenomenal number. It's the size of a small suburb. Imagine us turning up on the Monday of budget week and finding out that the wi-fi didn't work. We switch and think, 'Well, that's okay because we've got mobile, and we'll go to mobile broadband, such as its performance is in a building like this.' But, when that doesn't work, we figure we'll go to our desktops and connect up through an ethernet connection. But, when that doesn't work, we figure we'll just have to put up with it—these are first world problems, as the kids say—for 15 minutes. But that turns into half an hour, which turns into an hour, which turns into a day. It turns into four days. It turns into five days in budget week. Could you imagine how this place would respond with no phone or internet access for five full days?

I relate that experience because that's what the constituents I represent have had to live with not just in one suburb but in a number of suburbs in the electorate of Chifley in Western Sydney. It has brought home to them yet again—and certainly to me, as their representative—how dependent we are on reliable communications. It's not just, as some people might try to dismiss, some sort of luxury. Modern communications are needed by a lot of people to operate businesses, including home based businesses, and for a whole host of other things that they're dependent on, such as accessing government services and doing their shopping, and for whatever else they've become used to. When it's gone, you really feel it.

Over the last few months, I've spent a lot of time listening to families, small-business owners and workers in my electorate who've asked for something that many Australians have taken for granted: a connection that works when they need it. As I said, those communication networks underpin almost every aspect of modern life—how people work; study; access health care; run home based businesses; connect with government services; stay in touch with families, friends, communities. Reliable communications today is essential infrastructure. It's on par with electricity and water. When that infrastructure fails, people quite reasonably expect accountability and improved service. That is why the Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025 matters.

It's a bill that strengthens consumer protections in telecommunications by giving the regulator way stronger enforcement powers, making industry standards mandatory, ensuring there are real consequences when providers fail to meet their obligations. Much of what this bill seeks to do collides with the experiences of constituents I'm proud to represent.

In December, Colebee experienced a simultaneous fixed line outage and mobile network outage. That combination effectively knocked out almost every single way people connect. Some were left without connectivity for up to four days. Then, just weeks later, residents in Bidwill copped the same thing: outages left households of entire streets without internet or wi-fi for days at a time. Some reported outages that lasted up to five days, and, during those outages, many residents contacted my office to raise their concerns about the reliability of mobile coverage, the limited choice of retail service providers and the overall quality of telecommunications services in my area.

So, in January, I held a telco town hall with local residents in Colebee to talk about the quality and access of service in their area. I want my community to feel confident that their experiences are absolutely being taken seriously. Over 40 people came along to the town hall that night. Most of them work from home. Their jobs depend on stable, reliable internet. Here's what I heard. Families were told repeatedly that their service would be restored, only for it to drop out again minutes later. The cycle repeated. Many spent hours on the phone to providers without receiving clear information or reliable timeframes for repair. Residents also told me that, in practice, they're better off relying on updates from neighbours and social media than contacting telcos during service outages. Some told me they'd spend an hour or even more on hold just to get information they should have received in a text message. In our parts of Western Sydney, those outages hit particularly hard because this is one of the fastest growing parts of the country, with new communities filling with young families, first home buyers and small businesses.

In this day and age, as I said, getting access to communications isn't just an infrastructure issue; it's also a fairness issue. One resident told me he's lived in four different homes across Australia over the past 15 years, including in regional centres, and that moving to a new estate in Western Sydney—get this—was the first time he'd experienced such consistently poor service. He said, 'I've never experienced service this bad anywhere else in the country,' in a part of Sydney 45 kilometres away from the CBD. That's a sobering reflection when we consider that these suburbs aren't remote or hard to reach; they're in rapidly growing communities in metropolitan Sydney. My constituents wanted to know why they could be contacted instantly when a bill was due yet somehow couldn't be reached when there was an outage affecting the entire street. They wanted clear, timely information and some sense that someone's going to actually be accountable to fix the problem.

One story from that night has stayed with me because it captures the absurdity of the system as people experience it. A constituent told me he'd signed up for a one gigabit per second service, but what he was actually getting was around 450 megabits per second. That 450 might sound fine to someone who hasn't had to rely on that connection for work, study, telehealth and running a household, but that's not what he's paying for, and it's not what he was promised. He did what any consumer should be able to do—he called his provider to get it fixed. Instead of being helped, he was told to contact his wholesaler, Opticomm. The member for McEwen said he has had similar problems with Opticomm in his contribution to this debate. The constituent contacted the wholesaler. The wholesaler then sent him straight back to the retail service provider—a run-around, back and forth. This is a story too common. All he was asking for was the service he was already paying for and has every right to receive under a contract. The constituent recounted that he is so tired of the problem that he's almost given up. He doesn't want the full service he's entitled to; he just wants a stable connection. It's unacceptable that he has to resign himself to poor service. He was promised he'd get the service that he'd paid for, but he is not getting it.

Another issue raised at my town hall went beyond outages and spoke to the broader question of how these networks are evolving and how providers are treating customers. Over 10 years ago in Colebee, residents were instructed not to purchase or install an external TV antenna, assured that free-to-air signalling would be delivered through the then Telstra Velocity network, which was a fibre-to-the-home connection. Around 2020, Telstra sold the network to Opticomm. Then, late last year, Opticomm told customers it would shut down free-to-air access that used fibre networks in the former Telstra Velocity service areas, and that shutdown occurred in February.

As Free TV Australia CEO, Bridget Fair, has said, this was a key feature which households were invited—I just want to emphasise that they were invited—to rely upon. Opticomm simply told customers they should install an external antenna or purchase an interior one. Whilst Opticomm is not obliged to provide television broadcasting services and the government is unable to intervene to stop them, it's the way this situation was handled that bothers me and many in my community. The decision to stop free-to-air signalling unfairly shifts costs for decisions made by both Telstra and Opticomm, in terms of setting up the network and then running it thereafter, to consumers. What the conversations at the town hall made clear to me is that, while technical faults are sometimes unavoidable, the real frustration often lies in the lack of transparency and the absence of meaningful consequences when standards aren't met. Too often, consumers feel they've got absolutely no leverage, no power and nowhere to turn to. Those are entirely reasonable expectations for what is now an essential service.

Following the town hall, I've raised these issues directly with Telstra and Opticomm, and I've also raised issues with Optus. I've told Telstra and Opticomm that the companies that made promises and didn't deliver should be the ones who stump up the cost of new antennas. I want to be perfectly clear here. Residents were forced to install new antennas that they previously had been told they never needed. Those residents should be compensated. I've sought updates on the outages, pushed for clearer communication protocols during service disruptions and asked for specific responses on compensation, mobile coverage gaps and infrastructure delays, including the long-awaited activation of a mobile tower in Colebee adjacent to the Stonecutters Ridge golf course. I'm pleased to report the following feedback from the town hall. Optus has told me they're bringing forward the deployment of tower infrastructure at that site.

But all of this isn't just happening in my electorate. What's really concerning is that the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman continues to report tens of thousands of complaints every single year about faults, outages, poor customer service and billing disputes. The Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, repeatedly identifies systemic issues from irresponsible sales practices to unfair disconnection policies and poor information about coverage. At present, the penalties available for breaches of industry codes and standards just don't reflect the scale of telecommunications market failures or the harm that poor practices can cause. A maximum civil penalty of $250,000 might sound substantial on paper, but, for a lot of companies with billions of dollars in annual turnover, it's unlikely to drive meaningful behavioural change.

This is the gap that the bill is designed to close. It significantly strengthens the compliance and enforcement tools available to the regulators. It increases the maximum civil penalties the Federal Court can impose to equivalent of nearly $10 million today and introduces modernised penalty frameworks, allowing the court to set fines based on the benefit gained from the breach or a percentage of the provider's turnover, which is huge. That approach aligns telecommunications with sectors like banking and energy, where we already recognise that stronger penalties are necessary. And it makes the industry codes mandatory and directly enforceable.

I just want to end on this point. We have been operating under a promise with telecommunications that it would continually improve. In fact, since the late nineties and the arrival of the internet, we've been told we will get access to communications in a way that moved us beyond that historical relic known as the landline. We have been told every time a new mobile network rolls out that we'll get better service. It started with 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G; 6G is literally around the corner. Even with those great leaps forward, people still complain. Bizarrely, they cannot get a mobile signal in their home. It doesn't matter if you're in an urban area or a regional one.

Frankly, in this chamber, it's too often the case that, regardless of our politics, we will have representatives from different parts of the country talk about why telecommunications isn't working for them. It's certainly understandable. With the way that our people live on the continent that is as great as ours, where it's spread out and where the distances are great between centres, it's understandable that there will be challenges from time to time. But my question is: why does it continue, and why is the promise of modern communications not being fulfilled? We should not still be having those types of complaints. We do have to ask questions about not just the standards but the promises being made by modern telecommunications providers to the people that we represent, from the member for Maranoa's electorate through to mine in metro Sydney, from regional Australia to our town centres. It should not be the case that, in this day and age, these telecommunications companies—regardless of who's in power, mind you—are always having the same complaints.

It's notable in this debate how many members of parliament have got up, regardless of the political colour of their background, to complain about the quality of telecommunications. This is sending a massive signal to our telecommunications providers, large and small: clean up your act; do better. The sector should be delivering. They keep extending promises to us, every single time, and yet we've still got constituents saying it's the same old same-old. They absolutely deserve better.

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