Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to raise a little-known issue which has caused constant annoyance to numerous Australian businesses for years. It's been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis as more people are working from home, remotely, and I promised a number of local businesses that I would look into this and raise it. So I acquit my promise here.

Every day, small businesses and sole traders receive thousands of calls from telemarketers, interrupting their working day, harming productivity and leaving them distracted and annoyed—frankly, driving people nuts, as the Australian Psychological Society identified. They didn't use 'nuts'; that was paraphrasing. But I hear this from numerous local people—from local tradies, a plumber or a sparky, who have to publish their mobile number to keep their business alive. You're out on the job, you're up the ladder and the phone rings. You get it, and it's the third call that day from an electricity company trying to flog you a better plan.

Small local businesses, like the optometrist, the corner store or the accountant, don't have enough staff for a receptionist, so other staff waste untold numbers of hours trying to get telemarketers off the phone. Only last month, a friend who's a barrister actually told me that the single greatest annoyance with the transition to working from home was his complete inability to stop telemarketing calls that were forwarded to his mobile. These businesses all have better things to do than bat away unsolicited and unwarranted calls. Individually, this might seem like a small issue, but the overall impact adds up because unsolicited calls cost small businesses and the Australian economy a fortune in lost productivity. It's literally thousands of hours of paid employees' time spent answering unsolicited calls.

I believe that businesses, or at least small businesses, should be allowed to opt out of telemarketing calls via the Do Not Call Register. The register was introduced in 2006 by the Howard government and was strengthened in 2009 by the Rudd government. It allows individuals to register their phone number so that telemarketers don't and cannot call them. Each month, the marketers submit their phone list to the register, and those registered numbers are removed, preventing those unsolicited calls in a process called list-washing. But unfortunately, 14 years on, the Do Not Call Register still applies only to phone numbers that are used primarily for private and domestic purposes. Business and emergency service numbers are not eligible to register. But the departmental data shows that, year after year, businesses still constantly try to register, so, clearly, there's a demand from business for these numbers to be included on the register. Constituents who raise this with me from time to time plead for this service. They just want to get back to business.

To my mind, this change is a no-brainer. Both the original legislation, interestingly, and the 2009 Rudd government amendments proposed that business be able to opt in to the register. Yet, after the Senate mucked around with it—they muck up our good work at times—it wasn't included in the final version of the bill, and I think it is time we fixed this.

The numbers are big. In 2009, 11 years ago, the Australia Institute estimated that the time wasted on unsolicited telemarketing calls was worth over $1.58 billion per year. Of course, there were also other economic costs, to be fair, including impacts on competition identified by Access Economics, so there's a cost-benefit. But, in the last 10 years, I think the case to let businesses, or, at least, small businesses, register has only strengthened, because, as a proportion of the overall direct marketing spend, phone calls have decreased in favour of emails, social media and internet campaigns.

Also, we're seeing a radical transformation in the working arrangements of small business in Australia, accelerated by the pandemic. So, as more businesses turn to work-from-home arrangements, moving to mobiles and diverting phones to employees working from home, COVID-19 is making it hard enough for them to be efficient. Millions of people are working from home with children and numerous distractions competing for their attention, and the last thing workers need is more unsolicited calls from telemarketing companies for mobile phones, electricity, insurance deals—you name it.

Of course any legislation needs to be sensibly crafted and workable, but it is doable. Ultimately, it's a matter of political will. Consultants and think tanks can come up with any form of cost-benefit numbers that support or distract from the case. They'll use assumptions one way or the other—that's how these things work. But, on this issue, I don't think we should be swayed by the he-said, she-said of cost-benefits. The issue has remained unresolved for so long, and we should be guided by common sense. More than two million small businesses and sole traders should have the right to choose to opt out of annoying telemarketing calls, to just let them get on with business. It's not a big thing, but it adds up across the economy, and it would mean so much to so many sole traders who have no choice but to put up with these calls every day. So I'm calling on the government, in thinking about their future legislation, to put the issue back on the policy agenda and introduce legislation to expand the Do Not Call Register.