MICHELLE ROWLAND MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS
MEMBER FOR GREENWAY
 

DOESN’T MINISTER FLETCHER HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN AXE UNTIMED LOCAL CALLS?
 

So nostalgic is Minister Fletcher, he has returned to a 2014 deregulation paper he devised as Parliamentary Secretary to inspire his regulatory priorities in 2020.
 
We all know how the more exuberant proposals in Mr Fletcher’s 2014 deregulation bonfire eventually ended: with Malcolm Turnbull and Mitch Fifield’s red pen.
 
Mr Fletcher’s weird deregulatory obsessions included undermining consumers by proposing Customer Service Guarantee protections be determined by the free market; reducing privacy protections for users of telecommunications services; and abolishing untimed local calls.
 
Here is what Mr Turnbull had to say when mopping up Mr Fletcher’s 2014 plan to abolish untimed local calls:
 
NEIL MITCHELL: Will you take this idea out and shoot it?
 
MALCOLM TURNBULL: There will be no change to that regulation at all.  The requirement to offer untimed local calls will continue, there won’t be any change there.
 
Rather than wasting the Department’s scarce resources searching for ways to undermine consumer safeguards, the Minister could perhaps focus on delivering spectrum reform which, five years after he launched the spectrum reform process, still has not been delivered by this clueless Government.

TUESDAY, 28 JULY 2020