Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025

Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (12:05): This bill, the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025, will permanently establish the Triple Zero Custodian within the department of communications. I associate myself with the comments of my colleagues in relation to this bill which is so important in addressing the clear exposure and risk that Australians have witnessed in recent times.

I've only had to ring triple 0 once in my life and I had to do so relatively recently, when I was with a very good friend whose grandchild lost consciousness—a tiny new baby. He, a very experienced GP, asked me to make the call to triple 0, as the child lost consciousness. I cannot tell you how frightening that experience was and how terrifying it would have been to not have anyone respond to our desperate call.

We stood out on the pavement, waiting for the ambulance to arrive with the important equipment to save that child's life, and I feel for every person who made calls like that in those recent emergencies. Every Australian has the right to expect that our emergency services are available in such a crisis, and it appals me—and I've heard from many voters in South Australia about their expectations and disappointment over the failure to make sure this did not happen.

I also want to say, as my colleague Senator Hanson-Young has pointed out, that this has been a series of multiple failures. Two years ago, this was clearly delineated as a problem in the regulation of Optus, and they came forward with apologies and promises of action as a big corporation. They failed to follow through and take the action that was expected, and here we are again, this time with three deaths and the loss and grief of communities—including in South Australia, with two deaths in our own state—arising from corporate failure.

This is a corporation, Optus, that failed to put the interests of our citizens ahead of its profit and ahead of the interests of its board—a corporation that took this issue to its board before it took it to the government, to the state premiers or to its regulator. So this is the failure of a corporation to put the interests of our community first, but also the failure of a regulator.

This is a persistent pattern by this government, where we see the regulation of corporations failing us over and over again. I've had the recent experience of questioning ASIC about bank failures—the recent failure of ANZ to look after its customers and its government relationships in a fair way, a few years on from a very expensive and huge royal commission into our finance sector which revealed, in a range of very large, very profitable banks, a series of very significant failures.

Here we are, in recent days, back with ANZ before us for repeat offences and facing a very significant fine, the largest corporate fine in Australian history—$240 million—for charging dead people fees; for overcharging people on their interest, well above what they were contracted to pay; and for taking the Australian government down the road of manipulation of a huge bond issue, which ANZ made a lot of money out of at the cost of the citizens and taxpayers of Australia.

We see repeat offences in the corporate sector and a failure to properly regulate very, very profitable companies. We see regulators that too often fail to really push for action. We need to see action—criminal penalties—where criminal acts are performed.

In the case of ANZ, there were very clear failures in their performance across a range of matters, and there's a sizeable fine, but no fine for the individuals who perpetrate these failures of regulation and who, in many cases, make a great deal of money out of their so-called failures. We need a government that is not captive to these big corporations, not captive to the interests of Optus or its regulator, and that has a legal framework which allows us to properly pursue failures, such as what we saw here with Optus, and to properly impose those regulations.

I'm very strongly supportive. As my colleagues have said, enough is enough. When a corporation fails like this, which has clearly resulted in death, great loss and grief, it must be held to account.

We need genuine independent oversight of Optus. Multimillion-dollar companies like Optus, who are very happy to make a great deal out of Australian citizens, must be held to account. We can't forget why this bill is before the Senate this week.

It's been all about putting profit before safety. Our regulations have failed to protect the community, and, in the future, we need to see a much more improved response to a catastrophic series of events. As I've said, it's not the first Optus scandal—far from it.

There have been three triple 0 outages since 2023. The November 2023 outage left almost 2,700 triple 0 calls unable to connect. Optus also suffered a massive data breach in 2022, affecting up to 10 million current and former customers—that's a third of the Australian population.

Just last month, the Federal Court slapped a $100 million fine on the Optus group's mobile division for taking advantage of vulnerable customers. How much evidence do we need that this is a failure of corporate regulation and of corporate ethical behaviour? In many instances, the affected customers did not want or need and could not use or afford the phones and contracts they were sold.

In some cases, customers were pursued for debts resulting from these sales. On top of that, Optus pay no corporate tax in Australia despite their $8 billion in revenue from Australian customers. Optus is the third most distrusted brand in this country and the most distrusted telecommunications company, and it's clear why.

Australians are not fools. Optus used to be the most distrusted until Coles and Woolworths overtook them with their blatant price gouging. Triple 0 is an essential service that was privatised to Optus, a company that has put its corporate profits ahead of safety.

And the regulator, ACMA, is missing in action. ACMA is a bad regulator and has been captured by industry interests. It's a corporate lapdog, not a corporate watchdog with real teeth.

It's a toothless tiger. The truth is that for too long ACMA has been too weak and too cosy with the big corporations it's tasked with regulating. Comprehensive reform to communications and media regulation is long overdue, but sadly it's been squibbed by successive governments.

The agent needs a big broom through it. Wherever you look, this Labor government is captured by big corporations: with the housing crisis, captured by banks and wealthy property investors; with the climate crisis, captured by coal and gas corporations; and, with the cost of living and supermarket price gouging, captured by the big supermarket duopoly of Coles and Woolworths.

What about the repeated scandals in the consulting sector? 'Don't worry; we'll let PwC back into government contracts'—captured by dirty donations from the big four firms. It's all very cosy, all very friendly, and there's a very active revolving door of people between these institutions, undermining regulation and ignoring the consequences of unethical and poor business practice.

Let's look at the recent example of ANZ. It's six years since Commissioner Hayne released the final report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. The report was a scathing account of just how poorly banks have been treating many of their customers.

We have banks that are amongst the most profitable banks on the planet, and they treat us so appallingly. Australians had hoped the royal commission would be a watershed moment and that the sector would improve, yet here we are, with the misdemeanours of ANZ, which I spoke of, in relation to four separate misconduct issues: the bond deal that I spoke of; the failure to respond to hundreds of customer hardship notices, in some cases for over two years; the false and misleading statements about its saving interest rates, as well as failing to pay the promised interest rate to tens of thousands of customers; and the failure to refund fees charged to dead people, with no response to loved ones trying to sort things out.

Just like Optus, ANZ has betrayed the trust of Australians time and time again. This bill, along with our push for criminal penalties, is long overdue. The bill does the bare minimum of what the government promised to enact years ago.

To avoid another deadly disaster, Australians deserve a telecommunications regime with stronger penalties, stronger regulation, a watchdog with teeth and operators who put the citizens' interests ahead of their profit and ahead of the interests of their board.