David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Three people are dead because a private corporation was allowed to prioritise profits over safety. That's what privatisation looks like, and we should be clear that it's killing Australians. I want to put on the record my gratitude not only for that contribution that my colleague Senator Allman-Payne just delivered but also for the work that my other colleague Senator Hanson-Young has been doing in shining a light on just how dangerous the privatisation of this essential service, the triple 0 service, has been for Australians. I think many Australians are now utterly horrified that the number they call in the most extreme moments of need for them or their family is being routed through private corporations who may not even pick it up because they've got other things to do with their money—profits they want to send offshore.

The Optus triple 0 outage on 18 September wasn't just a technical failure. It wasn't just technology not working in that moment. It was a policy failure delivered by decades of rampant privatisation by the coalition and Labor. That's what happens when this place and other governments across the country hand essential services to corporations. What happens is that people die. And it's not a technical failure. It's baked into privatisation, where corporations, who are required under law to put profits first, put profits before people and safety. You only have to have a look at what Optus is doing as its business model. Optus rakes in about $8 billion from Australian customers. Mums and dads and students pump the money in, and Optus pays zero in corporate tax because they offshore their profits. Then, having raked in $8 billion from Australians and having paid zero dollars in corporate tax, they can't even keep triple 0 working because spending any money on triple 0 will eat into the profits that they can send to their offshore owners. Last time they did this—because, of course, Optus has got form—they got an $11 million fine. They didn't even notice it! It's a rounding error on the profits and the incomes that they make. It's pocket change for a company like this, not a serious penalty.

I again want to commend the amendments that my colleague Senator Hanson-Young is putting forward so that we can have legislation where, if you're going to leave this essential service in the hands of a private corporation, we can have penalties that are meaningful in terms of their business model. Not millions but billions are what should be paid if ever a company like this kills another Australian because they don't think funding essential services is needed.

We shouldn't be having this bill in front of us today because this was all apparent and clear in the 2023 outage. We're going to support this legislation, in one form or another—hopefully with some penalties that meet the damage—because something's better than nothing. I can tell you this: communities deserve far better. Once again, it's the Greens who are standing here, calling for serious penalties for corporate malfeasance and for when the negligence of corporations results in death. It's the Greens who are here saying that corporations need to be held to account and that regulators need the powers. It's the Greens who have been repeatedly calling out the failed experiment of privatisation—that religion of privatisation that both Labor and the coalition keep preaching but that Australians know is a short path to scrapping services, and, in this case, doing so with lethal consequences.

Essential communications must be publicly owned and democratically controlled. As the Greens digital rights spokesperson, I've been fighting for years to get people to hear that we need to talk about nationalisation and public ownership, and not just for telecoms. Let's dream bigger than just resurrecting Telstra. If it's essential for our lives, it should be public. We don't privatise the fire brigade or ambulances, and we shouldn't privatise the infrastructure that connects us to emergency services. We also shouldn't hand our entire digital public sphere over to corporations that answer to no-one but their shareholders. Digital platforms have become essential public infrastructure, and they're often the primary way that governments communicate with citizens during emergencies. In the 20th century, we built public roads, public schools, public hospitals, and, in the 21st century, we need publicly owned and controlled digital infrastructure, starting with our telecommunications networks. Why should Zuckerberg control how Australians communicate during bushfires? Why should Elon Musk decide who gets to access emergency information during floods? Why should Google determine what health information Australians can find? These are public services being bought, sold and destroyed by private companies for profits. It's time to bring essential services home. It's time for public ownership and it's time to put people and this planet before profits.

I again say to the government: if you want to make good on some of the past failures, there's one pretty simple way to do this with this bill, which is to support the Greens amendments to make the penalties serious. Make the penalties meet the moment, at least. Join us. Maybe overcome decades of privatisation and the religion of privatisation. Maybe think about how public services should be provided by the public for the public.