CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr LITTLEPROUD (Maranoa) (10:07): I'm pleased to see that the ACCC recently made an announcement of a review into mandated roaming—some 10 years since they last looked at this. Mandated roaming means that if you've got a Telstra phone you can go underneath an Optus tower or a Vodafone tower and your phone will still work. It's not a novel concept.

In fact, most of the rest of the world already has this. You can actually access it any time you go overseas. But you can't do this in Australia, because of this monopoly of Telstra.

They are a virus that started in western Queensland and now goes into much of the peri-urban areas of Australia, where we are seeing our mobile telephony fall down in its ability to do its job. And it is not just Telstra. We're now seeing it with Optus, and we saw that, tragically, lives were lost because triple zero went down because Optus towers were not maintained.

Well, if you live in Western Queensland, that's a daily occurrence, because many of these towers are not maintained to the standard they should be. What we have, with the investment that the Australian taxpayer has made—and Australian taxpayers' money has built more than 1,500 new mobile phone towers for all these mobile companies—are isolated assets, where you'll go through four or five Telstra towers and then come to an Optus tower.

It isn't worth the paper it's written on, because you don't have the ability to tap into it. In remote areas, that is life and death. It's not about the convenience of ringing your girlfriend about going to have a cup of coffee; it's about being able to get off a highway after you've broken down or had a car accident to ring triple zero.

That's what we go through every day. It has taken 10 years for the ACCC to come around to this—and they were hoodwinked by Telstra, who said that if there was mandated roaming there would be no further investment in regional telecommunications. They didn't put a cent into it.

They never were going to, unless taxpayers were going to do it. We should never listen to Telstra, and the fact that we are now catching up is an embarrassment—that we do not have mandated roaming already in this country, after the investment we have made. But we also need—and I urge the government to look at the legislation they have on the books at the moment—to extend the Universal Service Obligation beyond payphones and landlines to mobile phone towers as well.

When the USO was put in place, mobile phones—lo and behold!—didn't exist. But Telstra gets $270 million a year to maintain payphones and landlines that no-one actually uses. They are getting a free hit.

That $270 million should be extended to maintain those towers. We should have mandated roaming that will give every Australian the ability to have telecommunications as a universal right not just to do business but to keep ourselves safe. That is common sense.

That's what I say to this government. Don't even wait for the ACCC. Fix the USO, and fix mandated roaming.