The Alliance provided a submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications – Legislation Committee Inquiry into the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025 (UOMO Bill 2025).
Public safety reform welcome
The Alliance welcomes the introduction of the UOMO Bill 2025 which will require Telstra Limited, Optus Mobile Pty Limited and TPG Telecom Limited to deliver baseline outdoor coverage across Australia. This is critical in rural and remote areas outside terrestrial mobile coverage, where no access to Triple Zero is currently possible outside of the home on standard mobile handsets.
Recent Triple Zero outages, which caused emergency calls to fail, and the dire consequences attributed to the outages, underscore the public safety imperative. The UOMO must therefore complement recent reforms to strengthen Triple Zero reliability.
Health equity to underpin mobile outdoor coverage
Reliable outdoor coverage is crucial in delivering health services and continuity of care to people living in rural areas, even with promises of satellite telephones being the solution, until weather or fires prevent coverage.
The Alliance recommends that health equity underpin the UOMO Bill 2025. Importantly, implementation of the UOMO should prioritise communities with known emergency access and health service gaps and align with Closing the Gap commitments on digital inclusion and health access.
Affordability and digital inclusion in rural Australia
Without affordability safeguards, improved outdoor coverage may fail to translate into real access for vulnerable groups, limiting the ability of the UOMO Bill 2025 to contribute to safety, inclusion and rural resilience. Accordingly, affordability and digital inclusion must be treated as a core consideration in the design and implementation of the UOMO Bill 2025.
The Committee should ensure that the legislation sufficiently acknowledges and mitigates affordability risks, particularly for rural and remote users, for example, by aligning the UOMO with broader national digital inclusion objectives.
“Reasonably Available” Must Be Appropriately Defined (sections 12F–12H)
The Alliance recommends comprehensive consultations with rural health stakeholders in the development of the “reasonableness” instrument so that it explicitly accounts for the rural contexts of outdoor coverage and cost, including but not limited to:
- Travel corridors between towns and service centres
- Areas of agricultural, mining, forestry and tourism activity
- Locations where health outreach, retrieval or emergency services operate, especially known flood/fire-prone zones
- Known black spots affecting Aboriginal communities, rural areas and outstations
- Areas with historic lack of robust telecommunications infrastructure and reliable coverage.
Standards and Benchmarks Must Reflect Health and Safety Needs (sections 12Q–12S)
The Alliance requests that an explicit statement be included in the first Ministerial instrument for standards/benchmarks setting out that the UOMO is a health and safety intervention, with measures designed to reduce avoidable harm in rural and remote communities (e.g. in retrieval coordination, farm incidents, remote worksites, and long road corridors used to reach care).
Moreover, emergency call reliability and outage resilience should be reflected in the standards or benchmarks. An example of a service standard could be to specify maximum repair times when outages affect rural health and emergency services.
Conclusion
The UOMO must address the urban-rural affordability divide, and specify rural/remote and First Nations-appropriate definitions of “reasonable availability”. In addition, it must enforce strong accountability mechanisms and establish health-informed equity performance benchmarks and how these will be monitored and transparently be reported on.