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

It is a great shame that our brief honeymoon with the coalition on these amendments appears to have come to an end all too soon. We are offering to give the ACMA and thereby the minister some teeth in some pretty important areas of consumer protection. These are issues that the minister himself has been extremely outspoken on in preceding years and so I find it curious in the extreme that the minister is not seeking to effectively grant one of his own agencies the powers to deal with these matters directly. I wonder whether the minister would like to spell out for us where exactly consumers will go for the matters that we have raised in parts G through to K that we have sought to insert, how exactly those matters will be addressed and why exactly it is that the government believes that it is not possible to provide metrics, for example, on financial hardship policies, now in the water space, electricity space and so on. A lot of work has been done in recent years about financial hardship policy for essential services, to pick that example out as one. Why should we not apply such policies to the telecommunications space and give ACMA the benefit of the doubt that if so directed they could indeed create standards that would be able to be benchmarked against to give industry participants a very clear idea of what exactly they need to come up with? If we can do it in other utilities, why not in telecommunications?