Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

Telecommunications really is fundamental to modern Australia. More than 99 per cent of Australian adults own a mobile phone; 93 per cent own a smartphone. Over a third of Australians worked from home regularly, according to the most recent ABS survey—which, in passing, does make you wonder what would happen if the Leader of the Opposition were ever to become Prime Minister and ban public servants from working from home. Suddenly public servants in the regions, with disabilities or with caring responsibilities would find themselves out of a job.

Digital health is mainstream. Over nine in 10 Australians have a My Health Record, and telehealth accounted for more than 25 million services. Online education is widespread, and we saw this particularly through the pandemic. Telecommunications are the way in which people access emergency services, with the 000 service receiving over eight million calls a year. Small business relies heavily on quality telecommunications. Over seven out of 10 Australian small businesses use mobile broadband.

So it is really pleasing, in that context, that we have a Minister for Communications who is so attuned to the importance of modernising our structures and systems so that they serve a digital economy. We saw today the communications minister announce a new memorandum of understanding between the eSafety Commissioner—currently the terrific Julie Inman Grant—and the Australian Federal Police to combat child sexual exploitation online. The communications minister has announced additional funding to keep communities and emergency services better connected in times of disaster by extending wi-fi services for evacuation centres. The communications minister has announced that a re-elected Albanese government would work to build on the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites to provide mobile coverage in emergency situations. We saw during Tropical Cyclone Alfred the outages in the mobile network that were caused. Low-Earth-orbit satellites provide much better coverage than additional base stations can do. And we've seen the Minister for Communications working on the issue of scams, alongside the Assistant Treasurer, the member for Whitlam, who, alas, will be leaving parliament this election. His work on scams, in conjunction with the communications minister, has been quite remarkable.

The communications minister has also been focused on delivering better broadband across Australia. The National Broadband Network was a Labor initiative announced by the Rudd government, but the ball was dropped by the incoming coalition government, who took Australians back to a copper rollout. That copper rollout has meant worse services for millions of Australians. We've now announced that we're finishing the job. The communications minister and the finance minister provided an additional equity injection, up to $3 billion, to NBN Co, which will ensure that NBN Co has the resources it needs in order to finish the rollout. This sits alongside Labor's legislation to ensure the NBN stays in public hands—legislation that the coalition voted against. Not only would they cut services if they were to win office; they could well privatise the National Broadband Network, a measure which would be disastrous for competition.

It's the competition lens with which I come to this bill today, the Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025, as the Assistant Minister for Competition. We do so often see in the competition space that it's monopolies that tend to treat their consumers badly. If you're fighting for market share in a highly competitive sector then you're more likely to be thinking about how you can best serve consumers. But if you've got consumers locked up then there is more of a risk that monopolies will abuse their monopoly power to take advantage of consumers.

We've seen an uptick in complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. The latest data from the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman shows that complaints progressed to the TIO increased 13 per cent between October and December 2024 compared with the previous quarter. There was also a 12.8 per cent rise in small-business complaints following four consecutive quarters of decline and a spike in 3G shutdown complaints. All of that is for the last quarter of last year, the most recent quarter for which we have Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman data.

There have been a range of high-profile incidents in the telco sector—the Optus data breach, significant service outages and claims of irresponsible selling practices, which the previous member referred to. In that context, it is vital that we update the consumer protections that are provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA, in order to boost its enforcement powers and penalties. Part of this is about removing the two-step process. If you're doing a barn dance, a two-step is a terrific thing! If you're making a complaint to the telecommunications ombudsman, it is not quite so terrific. What this two-step process currently requires is for the ACMA to issue a direction to comply to offending telcos. It has to do that, no matter how significant the breach. Then—and only if noncompliance continues—can it take further action. This bill, once passed by the parliament, will allow for the ACMA to take quick and appropriate action in response to breaches to immediately address consumer harm and hold telcos to account.

We've also increased the penalties. This has been an important priority of this government to ensure that penalties are commensurate with the problem they're seeking to address and that they are not simply treated as a cost of doing business. In the competition space, one of our first reforms in late 2022 after winning office was to increase the penalties for anticompetitive conduct. We did this because we looked around the world and saw that comparative nations had comparatively larger penalties. We increased those penalties for anticompetitive conduct. We've also increased the penalties on supermarkets who do the wrong thing by suppliers under the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct. The food and grocery code, set up by the Liberals and Nationals as a toothless, voluntary code was empowered by Labor. Labor's mandatory supermarket code carries multimillion dollar penalties. Extraordinarily, when the legislation came to the parliament, the Liberals and Nationals voted with the supermarkets. They voted for negligible penalties against Labor's tougher law.

This bill also increases penalties, increasing the maximum general penalty for breaches of industry codes and standards under the Telecommunications Act from $250,000 to approximately $10 million. Further changes will allow penalties for codes, standards and determinations to be based on the value of the benefit obtained from the offending conduct or the turnover of the relevant provider, allowing for penalties greater than $10 million in certain circumstances. That's exactly the approach that we've taken within competition law. Our increase in penalties ensured that the size of the offending conduct—the ill-gotten gains, if you like—could be taken into account when considering the appropriate penalty, as could the size of the entity. That's why for supermarkets, worth billions of dollars, the penalties can be in the millions of dollars. That is appropriate for the most egregious conduct. We hope that those penalties will never have to be used, and the experience in many other areas is a positive one. When the penalty is commensurate with the offence, then you see firms improving their action. You incentivise better firm behaviour. You don't need to deploy those penalties.

The penalties framework under this bill will be aligned with those in other relevant sectors like energy and banking and the penalties under the Australian consumer law. There will also be an additional change to expand and clarify the government's ability to issue the infringement notice penalty the ACMA can issue for all applicable breaches, including for consumer protection rules—another tool in the armoury of the ACMA to be able to stand up on behalf of consumers.

The bill will increase the visibility of providers operating in the market, particularly telecommunications retailers, through the establishment of a carrier service provider registration scheme and allow for more effective regulation of carriers. Where a carrier has been found to pose an unacceptable risk to consumers or to have caused significant consumer harm, the Australian Communications and Media Authority is able to block them from operating. Of course, that would only be applied in the most extreme cases, but it is critical that that powerful deterrent is in the hands of the regulator. This is critical for ensuring that Australians are looked after in their dealings online, which are, as I said at the outset, an increasingly large part of our lives.

This government too has put in place a world-first minimum age for accessing social media. That is a reform which is being watched closely around the world. International researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have praised the Australian approach. It recognises that kids should be allowed to be kids, to go out and kick a footy, play with their mates, play a board game and engage with friends, and that, increasingly, digital devices are robbing them of the childhood that previous generations enjoyed. The highly addictive nature of social media makes these rules appropriate, with, of course, a carve-out for activities such as mental health support services, education or science. The focus here is on the highly addictive, slot-machine-like social media sites.

That consumer safeguard applies to those who are under 16. In effect, United States law—section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—set 13 years old as the age for accessing social media. In Australia, we believe the rule ought to be 16, and I would be surprised if, over the coming years, other countries didn't move to that similar standard.

This consumer protection focus is a core part of what the Albanese government have done within the telecommunications sector, but alongside that we are a government that is strongly pro research and innovation. We recognise the value of telecommunications innovation in serving Australians. We've strongly supported the 5G rollout and the movement towards more advanced devices. We want Australians to get the very best of artificial intelligence and of the improvements in telecommunications technologies. We understand that, used well, these are tools for cyberconnecting, as Nick Terrell and I put it in a book called Reconnected a couple of years ago. By cyberconnecting, we can build stronger in-person communities and use the technologies to empower face-to-face engagement, not to supplant it.

Labor understands the importance of a competition and consumer focused approach. You saw that at this very dispatch box two days ago, as the Treasurer brought down a budget which had competition as one of the core drivers of productivity. Productivity growth languished under the former government, and one of the ways in which we seek to turn that around is through competition and consumer reforms like this one before the House.

Labor's competition and consumer agenda is an ambitious one. We make no apologies for that. We established the competition taskforce within Treasury, which has spearheaded the biggest reform of our merger laws in 50 years and a revamp of national competition policy, curtailing the abuse of non-compete clauses. There's work to deal with the problems that the supermarket duopoly can cause for both shoppers and suppliers. Labor's supermarket reforms are about ensuring a fairer deal for farmers and a fairer deal for families. This bill before the House is about ensuring a better deal for telecommunications customers. Everything this government does is focused on the best interests of Australians, and I commend the bill to the House.

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