Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025

Mr JOYCE (New England) (10:16): At the outset, I would like to commend some of the comments of the member for Makin. It is a big issue we are trying to deal with when you have people in regional areas saying, 'Unless we get the financial assistance grant system working properly, looking after the more remote regional government areas, these council areas will not be viable or sustainable.' It seems ridiculous that a place such as the Gold Coast or the centre of Sydney—the Sydney regional council—has a financial assistance grant yet you have places such as Bingara or Uralla out in the regions that are struggling to look after their roads.

These big councils would make vastly more out of parking fines. We don't have that attribute in remote and regional areas. Everybody has been saying that we should be adjusting the financial assistance grants process.

We keep talking about it, but we never seem to do it. Maybe it is for the astute people, as we go towards the coming election, to come up with a policy on that one. When I first got into politics in 2004, the big issue then was the final privatisation of Telstra.

It had been half privatised by the Labor Party. The government had privatised about 49 per cent of it and wanted to privatise the rest. It was Treasurer Costello at that stage.

I think the logic behind it was to use the money from the privatisation of Telstra to pay off what was at that point in time about $80 billion of debt so Australia would not have any debt after that. That was the trick we used to get ourselves out. However, in regional areas we were very concerned about this.

The reason we were concerned was that we just don't trust people to look after us when they privatise something and say that is the market and that will work. I was in an invidious position because the coalition had won four Senate seats in Queensland and I had actually had, at that point in time, the Liberal Party standing against me to try and beat me. When I arrived down here, I was not really part of the team as I should have been, and the biggest issue was that they needed my vote for the final privatisation of Telstra.

I was completely new at my job. Neither I nor any of my staff had been in politics before, so it was rather intense. Trying to get the agreements through, with the universal service obligation, the network reliability framework and the customer service guarantee—myriad things—and trying to work out what sort of money needed to be put aside so there were some protections for regional areas was an immense task.

To be quite frank, I wasn't getting any assistance from either side of politics, and I was having to rely on people external to this building to give me some sort of guidance on where I'd go on that. I don't think we came up with the perfect solution, but I could see that, inevitably, if I didn't come to some sort of agreement at that point in time, they were just going to go around me and use somebody else.

So an agreement that did its very best to look after regional Australia was the one I had to take. The Labor Party had already privatised half of Telstra. There was absolutely no reason to believe that they wouldn't have it in their minds to sell another one per cent of it if they had the opportunity.

It was just a matter of time and trying to do the best you could at that spot. To this day, our office and, I think, many regional people's offices remind you of a front desk for Telstra. Any complaint about telecommunications seems to walk through our doors, and there are many complaints.

As this is a bill to deal with consumer safeguards—and I had a fundamental part in bringing about consumer safeguards back in 2005—it is disappointing that we just get these weasel words. We were given a guarantee that, when 3G shut down, people would not lose service. Now, there was initially a thing called CDMA, Deputy Speaker Goodenough; you probably remember it.

It had very low volume but an incredibly good footprint for voice. When that shut down, it went to a thing called 2G, a smaller area but with more data. Then it was 3G, a smaller area again but with more data.

Now we're heading to 4G and 5G. But, as they shut down 3G, a lot of people who used to get voice—and this is imperative—don't get it anymore. Mr Pasin: That's right.

They promised us they would. Mr JOYCE: This is one of the big things—the member for Barker would be in exactly the same boat—that defines regional people compared with people in capital cities. It can be dramatic if there's an accident.

The other day I was coming along a road, and I noticed there was a lady, a young girl and a guy—a wild-looking bloke—on the road. They were just standing around. I was trying to work out what was going on, and as I came slowly around I saw that a car had gone off the road.

I stopped and I said, 'Who was in the car?' They said, 'They're still in there.' We got them out and walked them up to the edge of the road, but they were very close to dying. The issue was we had no phone service. There was no phone service.

It was about an hour and a half to two hours before an ambulance turned up. That was just one day, driving back up from the coast. We've had other examples, like when a bushfire breaks out.

When the fire goes, you've got to move really quickly to try and deal with it. We all have to deal with that in regional areas. But people are having to drive kilometres up the road to get phone service so they can ring the bushfire brigade and also start to organise amongst themselves—because in country areas people organise their own section of the bushfire brigade.

But to contact people you've got to be able to phone them. We also have UHFs. At our place, it's channel 41.

But, if you don't know what the UHF is and the other person doesn't have UHF on, you can't contact them. Five, 10 and 15 minutes is huge when you're trying to deal with a fire. It's absolutely massive.

It all comes down to us having a reliable phone system, and we don't. We've had a petition in our area from Cropper Creek, Cooletai, Gravesend, North Star, Warialda, Bingara and Upper Horton—some of these are coming into New England. They're fed up with trying to operate their business, security and lifestyle without a phone that works.

Just recently I went to the cafe at Gravesend, which is coming into the electorate of New England, and the big issue that people wanted to talk to us about is that they don't have a mobile phone system. To be quite frank, many areas have just given up on fixed lines. They don't even bother to maintain them anymore.

It's antiquated technology. A lot of local people say, 'We can't rely on Telstra. We're going to have to look at Starlink and go with the new forms of technology that go straight from your device to low-Earth-orbit satellites.' But I think that's about 150 bucks a month, before we start worrying about calls.

It's not cheap. But people say, 'It is absolutely fundamentally part of our occupational health and safety requirements in this area that we have a telephone service.' We have a right to ask the telecommunications companies to abide by this, because they've got bucketloads of money from us to set up mobile phone towers and they got bucketloads of money for the assets they hold when they sell in and out of spectrum.

In some areas, there's a virtual monopoly on the provision of a mobile phone service. There has to be mandatory compliance with the industry codes that have been set up. There has to be, as this talks to, a proper infringement process if people decide there's a buck to be made by not abiding by the rules.

It'll continue to be the case, as you go to higher G delivery, that you're going to have more mobile phone black spots. These areas are going to require a vastly greater rollout of mobile phone towers. Alternatively, you're going to have to come up with some program, otherwise Elon Musk will be the provider for regional areas, because people will just go across to Starlink.

It's been my great honour to represent the people of New England. We've delivered around about 50 mobile black spot towers in places such as Balala, Bonshaw, Drake, Dungowan, Hillgrove, Kings Plains, Rocky Creek, Urbenville, Walcha Road, Woolomin, Attunga, Barraba, Bruxner Highway A and B, Tabulam, Duri, Elsmore, Fossickers Way, Hallsville, Invergowrie, Manilla, Moonbi, Mount Carrington, Oxley Vale, Piallamore, Spring Mountain Road near White Rock, Tamworth, Walcha, Westdale, Copeton Dam, Kingstown, Baldersleigh, which is west of Guyra, Koreelah, Pinkett, Mount Hourigan, Doughboy Mountain, Moonan Flat Exchange, Legume, Torrington, Wellington Creek, Weabonga—up the hill from me—Spring Ridge, Blackville, Gilgai, Bukkulla, Glen Elgin, Mole River Exchange, Tenterfield, Watsons Creek and Woodsreef Exchange.

As a regional member of parliament, one of the biggest things you can do is get people a mobile phone tower. It's not that they want to do share transactions; they just want to know that, when the campdraft is on at Upper Horton and you've got 1,000 people or so there, if someone comes off a horse and has a suspected broken neck, they can make the call straightaway.

People in regional areas have a right to be looked after. Going forward, we have to make sure that what we've seen with the telecommunications industry—we were promised so much; I was promised so much, and maybe at that early age I was naive enough to believe promises. I got over that problem pretty quickly.

In 2005 I was naive enough to believe that, when people made promises to you, they would actually do them. We're seeing this again. Now we're getting promises about energy.

There's another raft of promises that, to be quite frank, 20 years later, I just don't believe. I do not believe they're going to be able to maintain the grid in an affordable manner that will work. I've seen this movie before, and it ends in absolute and utter tears.

You end up with a complete fiasco, where people who have been able to swindle the government get whatever the government was naive enough to have peeled off it. The people who are left to pick up the pieces are called constituents. No matter what, the government never turns up later on and fixes the problem.

You're just left with a car crash, which was a proper, working telecommunications platform where people could make phone calls. In the future, the next one will be, 'You didn't honestly believe we were going to have an electricity grid that was actually going to work, did you?' When we go back to them, we'll say, 'Hang on, these people got 3G, and you promised they would get 4G and 5G, but now they're getting "no G".' They have no G at all—no gee-gees at all, no horseys at all for this one.

What went wrong here? Of course, the deal is done. They got the money.

They'll say, 'That was fortuitous!' Mr Pasin: I never heard of fortuitous service till this. They were just getting lucky! Mr JOYCE: You were just lucky that day!

Wind blowing in the right direction—aren't you a lucky fella that you had service at some stage! You should say, 'Thank you very much,' that, in the past, your mobile phone worked. Now it won't.

You see the sense of cynicism that regional politicians have about that, because, immediately, the dials change. Now, of course, it's back to the swindle factories, intermittent power precincts, and wind turbines and solar panels. 'It'll all be fine. Don't worry.

Everything will work well,' once they're decommissioned and fall over in the paddock. 'It'll all work well,' once the bisphenol A and the microplastics blow over your fields so you can't sell your stock in the saleyards because it's contaminated. That has happened. We have to actually come up with a plan to keep our cattle away from the wind towers because they are poisonous—so you don't eat it.

You've got about a teaspoon of microplastics in your head at the moment, and they don't want you to have any more. They don't tell you about that little bit, do they? No.

All you see is a happy picture of the wind turbine. You're eating the plastics from it, but don't worry— Ms Mascarenhas interjecting— Mr JOYCE: I don't know why you're laughing about that. I can show you—we have to sign a declaration because it brings on Alzheimer's disease.

Is that not a concern? Ms Mascarenhas interjecting— Mr JOYCE: Okay, I'll take you up on that. I'll give you the report.

I'll send it through to your office. Ms Mascarenhas interjecting— Mr JOYCE: Yes, it has! The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Georganas ): Order!

All comments should be through the chair. Mr JOYCE: I'll get it through to your office. This is the absolute ignorance of the facts of the issues.

You go out and you support the intermittent power precincts, and you aren't actually aware of the facts that are there in the report. I will get you the report. You should have read it, because I think it was on the front page of the paper!

Anyhow, I'll get it to you. You are doing it to our countryside, creating the filth all over our countryside and contaminating it. You're going to an election on the back of it because the minister, with his stupid smile, thinks it is a good idea.

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