Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Finally something has happened. Finally Senator Helen Coonan, the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, has announced the successful tenderer for the Do Not Call Register. I know, Mr Speaker, that you will be pleased about this, because you have put out a press release in your own electorate saying what a wonderful thing the Do Not Call Register is. I think everybody in this parliament has been on the Do Not Call bandwagon and, finally, the minister has at long last announced that an operator, Service Stream Solutions, will be in charge and that it will be operational by May this year. This is a very good thing, but it is well and truly overdue. Had the government allowed a vote on my private member’s bill in October 2005, the good burghers of Australia would not be putting up with at least 75 telemarketing calls each year—that is, 75 telemarketing calls a year that each one of us is getting. I have done a quick calculation which shows that we are losing up to two days a year with these wasted phone calls. There are 1.5 billion telemarketing calls coming into Australian homes each year, but finally the government has announced that the Do Not Call Register will be up and running in May—and it is about time.

Almost 95 per cent of people who responded to the Herald Sun’s issues of the 2006 survey said they wanted marketing calls at home outlawed. So in a survey of all the issues that affected people in 2006, the No. 1 issue was telemarketing calls. Recent research has shown that we are fielding up to 1.5 million calls a year—that is about 75 calls for each Australian—and many of these calls are coming from overseas centres, predominantly from India. An increasing number of Australian centres are shifting their call centres offshore to India, so many people have been complaining about the loss of jobs within the industry. The industry has already moved offshore, and we are getting these calls from overseas.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman recorded 1,738 complaints about telemarketing calls last year alone—that was double the previous year. So not only are we being annoyed by these calls but they are getting far more aggressive, far more abusive and the tactics the telemarketers are using to cold call and sell you something that is always too good to be true is also getting on people’s nerves. We have seen a proliferation in these calls and in the pressure tactics to buy.

Over the two years that I have been running the campaign to get a Do Not Call Register in place, I have received literally thousands of calls and emails at my office from people desperate for their sanity and peace to be returned at home. The ones I am most distressed about are elderly people at home who are often suffering from early stages of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Often we have had calls from very distressed family members whose parents are struggling at home and have been put literally into a state of complete and utter depression where they will not answer the phone any more because they do not know who it is. Nowadays a lot of these calls are connected from overseas, so there is a blank before you hear the caller. For a lot of elderly people sitting alone at home that is quite unnerving because they often wonder: is it a burglar down the road wondering if I am here and am I going to be robbed? They do not understand that it is a delay in the phone system, and five minutes later somebody is going to be on the phone saying: ‘Hello, Mrs White. Haven’t you heard about this wonderful product?’ She has not, she does not want to and she wants to be left alone.

I have also heard of numerous first-time mums who have struggled to get baby down to sleep and, you bet, there is that phone call they did not want. These phone calls mostly come at the witching hour, as I refer to it, the wonderful time when you are trying to get children fed, bathed and off to bed. The calls are coming, they are annoying and you do not want them.

This Do Not Call Register cannot come soon enough. While I commend the government for finally doing it, it is too late. Up to a million registrations are expected in the first week alone, two million within the first 12 months and seven million within the first two years. This is based on the experience of the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. There are a million households in Australia who are waiting for this register to be up and running. They have taken too long, but I finally want to say: at least it is here, and I hope some sanity will be returned to our homes in May.