Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2026
Senator HANSON-YOUNG (South Australia—Manager of Australian Greens Business in the Senate) (13:03): I rise to contribute to the debate on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2026 today. I want to put it clearly on the record from the beginning that this is a missed opportunity for the government to work with the parliament to fix Australia's broken telecommunications laws.
They are simply not up to scratch. They are not working and they are failing millions and millions of Australians. Australia's telecommunications laws are virtually silent on the need for mobile service to be reliable, to be guaranteed and to have some basic elements of standards.
Unlike landline services—you see those old phones plugged into the wall which of course have had, for many, many years, rules and regulations about how reliable those services should be—there is virtually nothing in law that says mobile phone companies must provide a reliable and working service to their customers. And yet Australians across the board now use mobile phones far more than they use landlines.
There are millions of households across Australia that don't even have a landline anymore and use their mobile phone service as their only form of telecommunication. Our laws are not up to scratch. They're not fit for purpose, they're out of date, and they need to be fixed.
There would have been an opportunity, in this piece of legislation—with proper negotiations, talk and a willingness across all sides of this chamber—to actually do something to improve the level of standard and reliability for Australians. But that's not what we've got here. We've got a bill that is really the bare basics and goes nowhere near lifting the level of standards and guaranteed reliability that Australians should expect and do deserve from their mobile phone carriers.
Why is it that we're debating a bill today that doesn't give proper regulations for working mobile phone services? It's because the mobile phone companies don't want these rules. The mobile phone companies, the big telcos— Telstra, Optus and TPG—are very happy not to have rules and regulations that say they must provide a service to their customers so that when somebody signs up for a mobile phone contract that it might actually work and that, if it doesn't work, customers should be entitled to some compensation.
If you've bought a product, if you've signed a contract and then it doesn't work, if it costs your business money and it costs you time, and if you've suffered as a result of your mobile phone not working, you should be able to seek compensation. But there's nothing like that in Australian law. The Greens are moving amendments today that would put that type of compensation in law so that Australians can rely on having a working mobile phone and the companies are held to account if indeed the phone service goes down.
We have seen hundreds—in fact, there have been thousands—of outages of the mobile phone network in the last year. We know millions and millions of Australians have been impacted in the last year because their mobile phone didn't work. This has been because the big telcos have been too busy looking after themselves, putting their profits first and not investing in reliable infrastructure.
Because there are no laws that require them to offer some guarantees about the reliability of their service, they get away with it. Because there are no laws that say they should pay if their service goes down and it costs their customers money, they get away with it. The big outage that happened in July—when millions of Australians were left in the cold with dead mobile phones, locked out of public transport, locked out of trading in their small businesses, not able to use their emergency distress buttons and not able to call triple zero—was because Telstra's system went down.
Do you know how much that cost the Australian economy? It cost $552 million. Australians are paying the price because the big telcos think they can keep getting away with a dodgy service.
I must say I'm a bit frustrated that we're in here today. We're about to ram through this bill, and it doesn't actually go to the heart of the problem. It doesn't matter how much spin the big telcos, the minister's office, the government or anybody else puts on it, this bill is going to pass and Australians have no more protection or guarantees that their mobile phone service will work.
I guarantee there will continue to be outages. There will continue to be failures of triple zero calls. The worst thing of all is what happens if you can't call triple zero.
What happens? Well, we know. Sadly, we've seen people lose their lives because the mobile phone companies were too busy putting their profits ahead of people's safety.
We had an opportunity to fix that in here today. This bill doesn't do it. I'll be moving a series of amendments that go to this point, saying that it should be a law that, if you provide a mobile phone service, it should work.
It should be the law that, if your mobile phone service—Telstra, Optus, TPG, Vodafone—fails, you should pay for that. The Australian people and taxpayers shouldn't be covering the cost. We'll put in place an amendment in this chamber soon and put to this chamber the opportunity for the government and the opposition to vote for domestic roaming.
Why is it that, in other countries around the world, people can swap from mobile phone company to mobile phone company based on being able to access a working service, yet, in Australia, Australians are locked out of that. It is just not right. The big telcos are laughing all the way to the bank.
They're clocking up their profits, yet the service that they provide is crap. It's unreliable, it's dangerous, and it's costing people their businesses and lives. We should have fixed it.
It should have been done in this bill. I think it is appalling that the pressure that the big telcos have put on both the Labor Party and the coalition means they've failed to do it in this bill—gutless, gutless, gutless.