Dr WEBSTER (Mallee) (26/03/25 13:16): The Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025 has some worthy aims. It seeks to ensure telecommunications businesses do not treat consumer protection provisions and specifically their penalties as a cost of doing business. Consumers ought to be treated with respect, and from the perspective of the Nationals, especially in regional Australia, this bill would allow ACMA to directly enforce industry codes and increase the penalty amounts for infringement notices and civil penalties. By the by, this parliament passed legislation by the same name last May for consumers affected by the statutory infrastructure provider, SIP, scheme.

When it comes to safeguards for consumers, I want to talk about the frequent contact my office has with Telstra, including at the recent Wimmera Machinery Field Days at Dooen, just north of Horsham, where I had the opportunity to meet with many, many locals with just as many issues and concerns. I took constituents who came to talk with me about their Telstra issues down to the Telstra stand and raised one or two of my own. After all, I drive the length and breadth of the 83½ thousand square kilometres of my electorate and encounter many mobile black spots. Sometimes you even hit one at the same place as a bitumen black spot—that is, a pothole—which are opening up on our neglected Mallee roads. That is a case in point, actually. Our roads are increasingly more dangerous, and we have had some bushfires this summer, so good mobile coverage for emergency situations is critical. I went for a chat with Telstra with constituents at the Wimmera Machinery Field Days, and to their credit Telstra representatives were only too happy to help.

The following Thursday, 13 March, I was in the district again holding mobile offices, and it was my absolute pleasure to be at Beulah in Yarriambiack shire, standing alongside Mayor Kylie Zanker and community members Shaun Thompson and Graeme and Jenny Turnbull from the Beulah supermarket action group, with many others, to announce that a coalition in government will provide $1.392 million to complement the $130,000 Shaun and the community have raised themselves to rebuild their supermarket. I remember all too well in 2019, the year I was elected member for Mallee, listening to distraught community members after the Beulah supermarket burnt down. I sincerely hope that we can get into government and get that supermarket built. Shortly after announcing the Coalition's funding commitment to Buehler supermarket, I went to the Buehler convenience store, the business centre which was once a hospital, to see the great job of repurposing that into a temporary supermarket. I note that money raised from the film The Dry has helped chip in financially to help keep Buehler's temporary store going.

I sat down in the business centre for a mobile office, and the first comments from everyone who came to speak with me were the same: 'Can you fix my phone signal?' Even my team and I onsite had trouble holding a mobile signal in the town. I got onto Telstra about that, and I am liaising with them to get some bars of signal back to Buehler. Incidentally, one lovely lady at the Buehler mobile office said, when asked about her Telstra signal, that hers is fine because she's with Optus! But then she mentioned, 'It's only okay on the verandah, not inside the house.' Were she, say, to have a fall and her mobile phone be the only communication device handy, how would she get out onto the verandah?

This is the lived experience in regional Australia, particularly in rural and remote towns. Their signal is patchy at best. I do ask the minister, while we are here, to bring to the House a government position on the 3G signal shutdown, because the anecdotal view from my constituents is that the mishandled 3G shutdown has now seen regional mobile telecommunications signals worsen, not get better. I dare the Albanese government to call regional Australians stupid, because there was a surge in complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman between October and December. That's 13 per cent more than in the previous quarter, including 190 complaints about the 3G shutdown in October, which rose to 566 in November. To quote the ombudsman, Cynthia Gebert:

It is encouraging to see the drop-off in 3G shutdown complaints in December, yet we are continuing to hear from people in rural and regional Victoria who are facing ongoing challenges. I implore the telcos to keep working on solutions that ensure equal access to reliable and phone and internet service for all people in Australia.

So my constituents, with my electorate covering one third of regional Victoria, were those lacking safeguards from this government when it came to the 3G shutdown. This bill is, after all, about consumer safeguards, and as I've said, what greater safeguard can you have than reliable mobile service in locations where you could encounter an emergency, like home? Indeed, as we recently experienced in devastating bushfires in Little Desert and the Grampians, let's remember, too, that Labor have not financed a single mobile tower in Mallee in this term of office—not one. I've lost count of how many we financed when in government. When we talk about safeguards for consumers, let's talk about all consumers, including regional Australians. I do go back to the Prime Minister's statement when he was elected that not one Australian would be left behind. Well, I'd say—woohoo!—the Mallee are included.

On black spots for regional Australians, I note that West Wimmera Shire put a number of submissions to the Round 8 Project Noticeboard, and Pyrenees Shire put in one for the CFA tower at Moonambel. I'm asking the minister to bring us a guarantee that a funding round will proceed and that this successful program will keep going as the Mobile Black Spot Program into the future. Regional Australians have no such confidence in this Labor government.

This brings me to the fanfare of the Albanese government pointing up in the sky and saying, 'Look up there—a UOMO!' What is a UOMO? Is it like FOMO, even though regional Australians cannot avoid missing out? Or is UOMO a man, which is apparently what 'uomo' means in Italian? Is it a bird, a plane or a bar of signal? No; a UOMO is the Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation. I think, given my constituents' experience with Optus at Buehler, the 'outdoor' word must be important. You need to be on the verandah, not inside the house. I know this government has been eager to claim that the Leader of the Opposition is having thought bubbles, but you really have to ask how bubbly this thought is from Minister Rowland. I hope she can fill us in. The government announcement is that legislation will be introduced this year. Well, with the election imminent, we're already effectively halfway through the year. And they say UOMO will be implemented by late 2027, a bit like Labor's electric car and greenhouse gas emission projections. But I digress.

UOMO apparently depends on identified flying objects, the low-Earth-orbit satellites, and direct-to-device technology allowing phones to be satellite phones. It sounds pretty straightforward. But, given the experience my constituents had with the bungled and stumbling 3G shutdown, how much more are regional Australians going to be asked to fork out to upgrade their handsets to UOMO? Will government and/or their telco give them a new handset?

The minister spruiked UOMO, saying you will have a signal almost anywhere that Australians can see the sky. That doesn't sound like inside your house, unless you put in a skylight, take the roof off or cough up more money for another device so you can get the same signal people enjoy at no additional cost in, say, Blacktown.

Some would argue that the right to communicate, including telecommunications, is a basic human right. Somehow, I feel this UOMO business isn't an attempt to tip the hat to FOMO or UFOs but to another acronym: USO, the universal service obligation. We have it with public utilities, where people pay the same price and get effectively the same service, wherever they live in Australia. We will have to wait and see if yet another enhancing consumer safeguards bill emerges to hold telcos to the UOMO as well. Nonetheless, I sincerely hope that this work is the work of the future coalition government in May. We aim to be on the other side of the House, and we will get a good look at how bubbly this thought bubble actually was.

But, when you consider that Labor couldn't even deliver on their own selective black-spot fund for Labor electorates, committed to before the last election, how will they be able to deliver for the rest of regional Australia? Labor couldn't even deliver under the selective improving-mobile-coverage round in several parts of Eden-Monaro or in parts of Robertstown, Braddon or Macquarie.

Mr Albanese's slogan before the election was 'No-one left behind, no-one held back'. But Mallee constituents have been held back, with no mobile towers and crumbling, dangerous roads, railroaded by the Albanese government's Rewiring the Nation agenda to cover Mallee in a spider's web of transmission lines, a pincushion of wind turbines and a series of mineral sands mining proposals, all emboldened by an Albanese government that is leaving farming communities behind or, worse, walking all over them. It is holding farming communities back, and, I've got to say, they are distressed. Labor are trying to convert Mallee into an industrial wasteland, taking away its primary industry: a sustainable, productive, agricultural industry. All they think is 'out of sight of the inner cities, out of mind'.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Goodenough): The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.

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