RRAT COMMITTEE – Order for the Production of Documents

I think the mess we find ourselves in with the 3G shutdown comes from an incorrect assessment of who should be in charge of this process. It became very clear to me and other members of the committee that I chaired that the government is taking a hands-off Pontius Pilate approach and have washed their hands of this. Their view is that this is a commercial decision of the telecommunication operators, and it should be them that leads this and decides on the shutoff and how it is done et cetera. I think that’s wrong for a couple of main reasons. No. 1 is that there is an ownership or almost moral point of view here—an economic point of view, perhaps. Noone has really mentioned the fact that the spectrum we are talking about that 3G devices will no longer connect to is a public asset. It’s actually not owned by Telstra or Optus or anybody else. They do lease it, they pay for it, but it is a publicly owned asset. Over the last 10 years, federal governments of different political persuasions have made $6½ billion from the sale of spectrum to Telstra and Optus and other people that use the spectrum. We have made money from that. We therefore have some kind of obligation here to ensure that those accessing that network, that public asset, continue to have reasonable use of it. But it’s been pretty clear from the get-go that the government or the department have not been doing that. As others have alluded to here, through our inquiry, it became very clear that perhaps the otherwise diligent public servants were not across the level of detail regarding the devices that would be affected from a 3G shutdown. I do want to recognise Senator Roberts for bringing an inquiry forward to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee. It has, I think, highlighted these issues. It has led to a delay in the shut-off date, but, as Senator Roberts mentioned, the penny really dropped when, during our hearing with the departmental officials, it became clear that they had only found out that week—this is only a month or so ago—that the emergency phones in elevators may no longer work after the 3G shut-off date. They’d only contacted the elevator manufacturers that week to try and find out what was going wrong. This has been five years in the making, and we’re a minute to midnight, working out something as critical as whether or not you’ll be able to make an emergency call—keeping in mind your mobile phone often doesn’t work in a lift—if the lift stops working. That’s not on, and it’s not really the responsibility of Telstra and Optus to make sure that elevators are working all around our country. They’ve got an obligation here in their own space, in thephone space, and there have been some shortcomings there. But there has to be a broader audit, led by the government, on what exactly will not work in a couple of months time and how we are going to fix it. We can’t just leave it up to Telstra and Optus alone. That’s why our committee did recommend that the government lead, with industry cooperation, an audit of all of these types of devices, like medical devices, security alarms and farm equipment—it was lots of things; we think it was possibly up to a million devices, but no-one knows for sure—to get to the bottom of this before the shut-off date. I have to say, unfortunately, I think the government’s response to this has been totally inadequate. They haven’t
committed to do any more work, as far as I can tell from this response, to get to the bottom of it. There are clear inadequacies in what has happened and what has been done. The government keeps referring back to the fact that it set up working group to deal with these matters in March—four years after it was announced that the 3G shut-off was going to happen. It took until March this year for the government to actually establish some kind of group that would look at these issues. It is not enough time, in my view, to give Australians six or so months from the creation of a working group to change their security systems and to work out whether lifts in buildings will work and also,
may I add, whether the phones will work. Even though we have largely got to the bottom of that, I think it’s still unreasonable to expect Australians to have to buy new phones with just months notice. We only found out a few months ago the exact number of phones that will be affected. The clear issue here is just to pause. We have to do this. We should do this. It’s right for our future to turn off the 3G network at some point, but let’s get this right. I don’t think an extra extension of a couple of months is going to be enough time to tackle the issues that we’ve dealt with, but we are now in the situation that, if there are major issues occurring on farms or in lifts or in hospitals in the next few months, it is clearly on the government’s head, because they’ve been warned. They were told to do something different, and they continue to wash their hands of this, incorrectly.