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

Senator GREEN (Queensland—Assistant Minister for Tourism, Assistant Minister for Pacific Island Affairs and Assistant Minister for Northern Australia) (18:35): The government is obviously very keen to work with all parties to enhance penalties for telcos. We've been clear about that from the beginning, and we certainly have flagged that there may be further amendments to the framework through the Telecommunications Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2025.

But we have indicated from the very beginning how important this bill is, and that is why we were willing to work with the opposition in terms of the amendment put forward. Senator Hanson-Young, as she foreshadowed, has moved a further amendment increasing that penalty to $30 million, and I indicate that, from the government's point of view, we are willing to support that amendment.

We on this side of the chamber are not on the side of corporate criminals, and we will certainly make sure that these penalties signify what the community standards and expectations are—but also those of the government. Our preference was to deal with it in the enhancing consumer safeguards bill, but, again, I'll just reiterate that, because of the importance of the custodian, we want to support the amendment put forward by the Greens to impose these new civil penalties.

For the benefit of the chamber, I know there is some interest in the issue of the register, and I might put that on the record now to enable us to work through some amendments. Following the September 2025 Optus triple 0 outage, the minister has been considering the appropriate regulatory and legislative settings. The minister has decided to formally direct the ACMA to make new rules to strengthen the telecommunications regulatory framework.

As foreshadowed by Senator Hanson-Young, the Minister for Communications has today written to the ACMA and said—and I think this language will be helpful to those interested in these amendments—'I will be issuing a direction to amend the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard Variation 2025 (No.1) to mandate that telecommunications providers maintain a public register of their network outages.

A public register of network outages will build on the new requirements to publicly report outages and will increase transparency and accountability around outage related impacts on access to triple 0.' I just wanted to update the chamber on those two important issues. On that basis, I think we can proceed with some amendments. Question agreed to.