Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak on the Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025, an important bill, because these are reforms that are designed to ensure that the Australian Communications and Media Authority is not just a regulator in name or a toothless tiger. This is about empowering it so that it's an effective protector of consumers, and that's why this is a good bill.

When you look at telecommunications in this country, no longer is telecommunications about wires and connecting a landline to a house or to a business. There's far more that goes into it nowadays. Our connectivity is reliant on a whole range of things, from the internet to the providers ensuring that we have connections so we can stay in touch with our families. It's how families stay in touch and how businesses are connected to the business world and operate. And, of course, particularly for regional and remote communities and communities that are isolated in other ways, it's their only connectivity that connects them to modern Australia. So you can see how important it is to ensure that everyone in Australia has connectivity, is connected to their telecommunications provider and has the services that they pay for. As with every other service, you pay for a particular service and you require that service to give you the goods that you've paid for. In this case, it's telecommunications. Every Australian, as I said, relies on it, and, because of that, every Australian deserves a system that's fair, accountable and built on trust.

But when that trust is broken—and many of us, in our electorate offices, see it on a regular basis, where people have paid for a particular provider to offer a particular service and, for whatever reason, it's a dead area where the internet drops out and their phones drop out—we see it, and we see the frustration that goes with that. Well, there is now a responsibility, and we give that responsibility to the authorities to be able to investigate and to ensure that the providers are doing the right things by the consumer, because, as I said, when that trust is broken, when consumers are misled, overcharged or exposed, it's everyday Australians who pay that price.

That's why this bill is providing the strong action that is required. The bill recognises the truth that a modern economy demands a modern regulator with real powers to act. It ensures that the Australian Communications and Media Authority, better known as ACMA, our telecommunications regulator, has those tools at its fingertips, has the authority at its fingertips and has the strength that it needs to protect consumers and hold the industry to account, because, without real consequences, standards mean very little. We've seen it in the past.

That's why this legislation is significant reform. It increases the penalties for breaches of industry codes and standards, not by a small margin—not just by a token margin, as we've seen in the past—but dramatically, from $250,000 to $10 million. That is a message to providers that perhaps have been doing the wrong thing or are not quite up to scratch with the services they provide for the money that's being given to them by the consumer, to actually have a really hard think about it. It really sends a message. It modernises the penalty framework so the Federal Court can impose fines that reflect the scale of wrongdoing, including up to $10 million, three times the benefit gained or up to 30 per cent of a company turnover.

The bill goes further. It strengthens enforcement by allowing ACMA to act quickly and decisively, including issuing infringement notices and ensuring industry codes are not just guidelines but enforceable standards. It also increases transparency by establishing a registration system for carriage service providers, ensuring bad actors and bad providers in the system cannot operate unchecked, because too often, as I said earlier, we've seen that Australians have been exposed to unreliable providers, misleading practices or services that fail when they are needed most.

I'll give you a small example of a provider that was trying to gain business in a particular area in my electorate—it was in the western suburbs of Adelaide, where my son and his wife reside. I went over to visit the grandchildren that day, there was a knock on the door, and my daughter-in-law went to the door. She came running back to me and said, 'It's someone from the government—the NDIS.' I thought, 'That's strange,' because I knew at the time there was a scam going around, or providers were trying to get extra business by claiming that the NDIS was coming to your area and, if you signed up, they would become your provider. I quickly went out and said to this chap: 'With absolute confidence, I know that the NDIS is not doorknocking. Where are you from?' We dug a bit deeper and found he was just a door-to-door salesman. The provider was using salespeople to increase their sales in, I think, an unethical way by not actually explaining who they were and where they were from. There was a stop put to that very quickly. This goes back a number of years, and I know that practice has been wiped out, but this is the type of stuff that we're trying to wipe out of this industry. It's about that and, obviously, about what people pay to ensure that they receive those services. It's about trust, it's about fairness, and it's about protecting Australians in a world that's increasingly connected. This bill matters because behind every industry code and every regulatory power is a real person that's affected. Sometimes, whole communities can be affected, as they depend on a service that simply has to work.

In another story, I was contacted about some serious concerns at the Ridleyton Greek Home for the Aged, which is in the western suburbs of my electorate. In correspondence, the general manager wrote to me—I asked him to put it in writing—and described ongoing issues with the facility's phone and nurse call system. This was a system that a particular provider had connected. Systems are not optional in an aged-care home. They're fundamental to safety, communication and care. The facility paid a substantial amount to this provider for the system to work. Originally scheduled to be completed in a short timeframe, there were problems. Though the aged-care home kept on paying, it was still not functioning to an acceptable level. Despite that, the provider began charging fees, and, during a particularly concerning period, families reported that they couldn't reach or struggled to reach the facility by phone, causing distress and complaints. Imagine if you had a parent or grandparents in an aged-care facility and you just couldn't get through. Staff were also reported to experience frequent call dropouts and disconnections, including when transferring calls. For an aged-care home, this is not an inconvenience; it's a risk.

This is the sort of stuff that we're giving powers to ACMA to be able to investigate. I know it's currently being looked at, and we're hoping for a resolution very soon. When families can't reach their loved ones in an aged-care facility, anxiety rises. When staff can't rely on the phones to coordinate their carers for shifts et cetera, that brings difficulties. When nurse call systems are unreliable, the stakes are not financial—they are human. We will be able to stamp this out through this new regulation and through this bill.

We require these reforms, because under stronger powers and stronger penalties, the regulator is better positioned to respond quickly when issues do arise—when telecommunications services cause harm. When industry code becomes directly enforceable, providers have a stronger incentive to comply, and consumers have a clearer pathway for protection. When infringement notices can be issued more effectively, poor practices will get addressed faster. There's proof in the pudding for that. When there's a registration scheme for carriage service providers, it becomes harder for dodgy operators to sit in the shadows of the market and sell their wares to unsuspecting consumers. Ultimately, it will be easier to identify who they are through this bill. This is what good regulation should do. It should protect families, protect consumers and not frustrate them; support essential services such as our telecommunications industry and not undermine them; and ensure that no organisation providing critical communications infrastructure can treat reliability and safety as optional. I'd like to congratulate the minister, who's in the room with us, for this good bill. I commend this bill to the House.

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