QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

Ms WELLS (Lilley—Minister for Sport and Minister for Communications) (14:32): I thank the shadow minister for communications for her questions, and I invite her to read the Bean review. It has 18 recommendations, of which 13 are now complete and five are still in implementation. Of those five, recommendations 3 and 4 pertain to new industry codes in the testing of both devices and networks, recommendation 14 is around temporary outage roaming during natural disasters and recommendation 15 is a mutual assistance memorandum of understanding to require mutual assistance between telcos during outages.

I make these points because the common thread is that each of those four recommendations is either being led by or depends on industry. At my meeting with the chief executives of the three telcos, who I summonsed to Canberra earlier today ahead of introducing the triple 0 custodian legislation, I urged industry to go faster on those remaining four recommendations that they have carriage of, and I'm pleased to update the House that they agreed to do so.

One of the good things about this new law is it creates new levers for the custodian to press industry when they are recalcitrant to get on with improvement. That is an improvement that would be delivered by the passage of the legislation. That is why I was very disturbed to hear on Sky News, just before question time and after the introduction of the legislation, which the shadow minister for communications was in the House to listen to, that she dithered and equivocated on whether the opposition would support the triple 0 custodian bill.

This is the shadow minister who is on record criticising me for not going faster. When presented with the opportunity to support the bill, she dithered and equivocated over whether the opposition would support it. Our role here is to build confidence in the triple 0 system.

I have been working as fast as I can to bring this legislation to this place. The question in the legislation is very simple, and it should not be difficult for the opposition to answer. The question is: do you support a stronger custodian for triple 0?

If the answer is yes and if you want to be useful, stop politicising this crisis and support the bill. Mr Hogan interjecting— The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Page is now warned.

I'll make a note of that. There's far too much noise.