Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak of an issue that I feel very strongly about: premium SMSs and their impact on the Australian community and our Australian youth. SMS messaging is a great service—if you call for it and you want it. But what we are finding more and more is that many people are subscribing to these SMSs without even realising what the costs are and how they are getting hooked into them. This is an issue that I have been campaigning on for a long time. I have called for provisions to be put in place to educate the public, and especially our youth, about the costs associated with premium SMSs. I took this up on behalf of residents in my electorate who had accrued enormous costs through their children’s mobile phones. I met with my colleague the Assistant Treasurer, Chris Bowen, earlier in the year to discuss the issue with him, and I am very pleased to say that an awareness campaign was launched last month.

Mobile premium SMSs include downloading ringtones and music, chatting, votes, horoscopes and competition entries—you name it and you can get it on your mobile. According to the ACCC, these services are often from numbers starting with 191, 193 to 197 and 199. Concerns have been raised about the way that premium SMSs are marketed, especially to children and teenagers, who are sometimes unaware of the huge weekly subscription charges associated with the service. With mobile phones now being a common accessory for youths, I am sad to say that the premium SMS industry is preying on the young to make profits. This is not on.

An astronomical number of mobile phones are in circulation—according to the ACCC, approximately 20 million. Costs vary greatly but can be as high as $6 for a message and ringtone to be sent and received—that is, $12 per message. This is a high price for a service which often appears in very deceptive advertising and where the costs are often not clearly displayed.

Families have written to us, stating they owe hundreds of dollars to the premium SMS providers, after children have subscribed without understanding what those costs are and what they involve. I have heard stories of children as young as 14 who are subscribing to these premium SMSs and, as a result, are unknowingly falling into substantial debt, which is often then passed on to the parents.

Earlier on this year, when I raised this matter in the media, I was inundated with examples of people from across Australia who had been caught by these gimmicks of premium SMSs. Some individuals who spoke to me owed over $4,000 for the use of premium messaging services. In most cases, as I said, they were young teenagers who were unwittingly, unknowingly subscribing to premium SMSs and were then continually charged, even at times when they would ask them not to send them any more messages. A bit of investigating showed that some of these companies in Australia were very hard to trace because they operate through overseas third companies. I am pleased to see that the ACCC currently has a couple of cases before it and it is investigating them. As I said, many of these services are also owned by offshore corporations. They are profiting from the youth and disadvantaged members of our society who perhaps do not understand the intricacies and the costs involved.

Some examples of the scams involved were brought to my attention by the Youth and Enterprise Legal Centre, which alerted me to companies holding competitions that result in a monthly or daily fee being charged to a person’s phone bill and providing services that claim the ability to detect your compatibility with a partner for $10 per week. It sounds pretty good!

I was pleased, though, that the ACCC and the Assistant Treasurer, the Hon. Chris Bowen, listened when I raised the concerns with them and, more importantly, that they listened to those concerns of the Australian public and launched a fact sheet to raise the awareness and increase the public’s knowledge of this issue. The fact sheet, released by the ACCC in August, refers to all the dangers. The ACCC states that, by law, ‘Advertisements for premium services must be upfront, clear, accurate and cannot be contradicted by disclaimers or fine print’— (Time expired)