Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will speak to the substance of Senator Dastyari's amendment when we come to the committee stage. I am not even sure that it has been circulated to all members of the chamber. I will just advise that the Greens, on the basis of our understanding of the Communications Legislation Amendment (Deregulation and Other Measures) Bill 2015 Telecommunications (Numbering Charges) Amendment Bill 2015, will be supporting the legislation. I thank the minister and I thank his advisers for offering us the briefing. It appears to the Australian Greens that this is basically housekeeping. It is an omnibus bill that sweeps up a number of different areas, particularly, streamlining the broadcast licensing regime; removing some of the licensing categories that I understand have never in fact been used in the entire time that they have been on the statute books; and maybe allowing ACMA to target its limited resources a little bit more directly at the areas where it needs to wave a stick or intervene.

The amendments on the telecom side around the ACMA and the ACCC's powers also appear to the Australian Greens to be reasonably sensible—again, streamlining recordkeeping, removing tariff fixing directions powers and a number of other fairly innocuous amendments, as far as we have been able to ascertain. I might put a couple of questions to the minister on the numbering arrangements when we get to the committee stage, but again I do not think there is anything here that we need to detain the Senate with overlong. This is sensible legislation that will clean up provisions that are either impediments to smooth functioning of the telecommunications and broadcast sector or are in fact completely redundant and have been placed in the statutes back in the mists of time and clearly have not been used and have not been all that necessary. As a housekeeping bill, we would certainly be supporting it. I think Senator Dastyari's amendment is something of a curveball and I think maybe once we get into the committee stage there will be an opportunity to debate that a little bit more directly.