I take great pride in seconding this motion. I acknowledge not just the member for Mallee and her interest but also the member for Gilmore, and I acknowledge her leadership during the Black Summer fires and her understanding of the implications of not having proper telecommunications in our hour of need.

Natural disasters invariably happen in regional Australia, and this is where our telecommunications are failing us. This has been a failure of policy settings for some years. The reality is that the more remote you get, the greater risk there is to human life, because we don't have the choice of a telecommunications provider. In most of these places there's only one provider, so you can't switch to another provider to be able to get that safety element. So what we have to understand is that there are broader scale policy changes that need to take place to ensure the safety of every Australian, and that's not just about mandated roaming. We should be doing this as a fait accompli, particularly for regional Australians.

We have isolated assets, where you may drive along a highway of 200 kilometres, and there'll be three Telstra towers and you'll hit an Optus tower. If you happen to have an accident underneath the Optus tower and you've got a Telstra phone, it's no good to you because you can't ring triple zero because you're isolated—you have no connection. The reality is that we have to think more broadly about this and about mandated roaming particularly in regional areas. If you go overseas, you pay your $5 a month, and you can actually have that. You can roam onto anyone's tower.

I don't think we should be giving this away for free. I'm not asking the telcos to do this, but I am simply saying that, if I have a have a Telstra phone and if I want to pay whatever the cost is that it costs them—$5 a month—then I choose to take that and put that on my phone. That is a policy setting that would cost the Australian taxpayer zero and would protect many of us in regional and remote Australia in our hour of need. That is common sense. I have advocated for that since I got to this place in 2016, and the ACCC for some reason in 2017, without even looking at this apart from sitting in their office in Sydney, thought that this will stop investment by the telcos in regional Australia. Telcos are not investing in regional Australia because the market is not there. You need about 2,000 people underneath a tower for it to be financially viable, so they don't give a rat's about us.

Telstra is a cancer, a corporate cancer, that has now spread from rural and remote Australia into peri-urban Australia because they are not investing in these towers because it's not commercially viable for them. So what we need to do is ensure they do invest in it. This is where not only should we have mandated roaming for regional areas for the consumer to pay but we should reform the universal service obligation. I acknowledge what the member for Gilmore talked about in the outdoor mobile obligation that they're going to put, but that's about the low-orbit satellites. We don't own that infrastructure. Elon owns that, and we're trying to regulate that. Let's think about what we can regulate.

We can regulate the infrastructure on the ground, much of which the Australian taxpayer has built. Many, over 1,500, new mobile phone towers were built when we were in government, and they continue to do a few of them now. But the reality is that the telcos have had a free hit out of this. What we should do is reform the universal service obligation that was put in place when Telstra was privatised to maintain landlines and payphones, because that was the technology in place at that time. Low and behold, mobile telephony has come along, but we haven't moved the regulatory guiderails with it. There is $270 million a year that Telstra has in a contract to maintain landlines and payphones. We've gone from about 64,000 payphones when Telstra was privatised down to about 14,000 now, and there are bugger-all landlines left. The reality is that they are getting a free hit.

What we should do—and this is what I've asked for the amendment to be—is have the universal service bill that's in front of the House extend to land infrastructure as well, and that $270 million should go into maintaining the towers. What we saw, this cancer that is Telstra and the telcos—that is what happened in that tragedy when triple zero didn't work and the system failed, because there was no maintenance and there is no regulatory burden on the telcos—and Telstra, in this instance, who owns the USO—to maintain the towers. This is where, as legislators, it would cost us nothing to extend the universal service obligation and use that $270 million to make sure that those towers are maintained and work to the standard they should.

A mobile phone tower should work to about a 14-kilometre radius. If they don't work to that standard, there should be a requirement for them to go out and fix these things within a certain timeframe; otherwise, we will be sitting here talking about this again, and lives will be lost. Yes, there was a tragedy in Sydney, where someone couldn't get through to triple zero. Come and live where I live, where we don't have triple zero most days, because the towers don't work, because Telstra doesn't give a rat's about us. This is where we need leadership and this is where we need bipartisanship to fix this.