Australia must slash red tape and open up mobile spectrum to meet the needs of the AI revolution, the head of the nation’s biggest telco warns.
Building digital infrastructure will be essential to supporting the rollout of artificial intelligence, Telstra boss Vicki Brady told the National Press Club in Canberra.
But the telecommunications sector was being hampered by more than 500 pieces of legislation and regulation, she said on Wednesday.
Backing Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ push to remove unnecessary red tape and lift productivity, Ms Brady urged the government to keep cutting away clutter and develop a national digital infrastructure plan.
Telcos had helped drive the internet boom by placing big bets on capital-intensive digital infrastructure in the expectation it would deliver strong financial returns.
That included flying helicopters across the continent to ferry the materials and personnel required to build 3G towers and make mobile internet connectivity possible.
But as the industry embarked on the next phase of the infrastructure build, such as connecting Australia’s far-flung cities with a web of fibre cables, regulation was making it harder to finance new projects.
To roll out 1000km of fibre between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, Telstra had to fulfil more than 6000 regulatory requirements, including land access activity notices, construction certificates and cultural heritage and environment surveys.
“This is all part of deploying infrastructure in a country as large as Australia and there are good reasons why these processes are in place,” Ms Brady said.
“But the volume of legislation, regulation and different requirements across states and territories has added significant cost and complexity.”
She supports the Business Council of Australia’s calls to reduce business compliance costs by a quarter by 2030.
“This would mean looking at what regulation may no longer be needed – like our obligation to publish and distribute paper copies of the White Pages.”
Not only did Australia need to get cables in the ground faster, it also needed to build out the “connectivity super highway in the air”, Ms Brady said.
That meant opening access to new bands of mobile spectrum to improve coverage in the bush and enable the roll-out of 6G technology.
The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association backed the Telstra boss’s call for the government to provide certainty that telcos would have continued access to spectrum.
“Freeing up spectrum and reducing red tape for longer licences will encourage long-term infrastructure investment,” head of spectrum and network infrastructure Chris Coughlan said.
“This will in turn deliver better coverage in regional areas, reduce congestion, and give the necessary access to deliver 6G tech and satellite-to-mobile voice and data services.”
Australia risked becoming commercially uncompetitive as countries such as the US rolled out digital infrastructure faster and at greater scale, Ms Brady said.
AI had the potential to almost double productivity growth over the next decade, but Australia needed to involve the public to build trust in the technology, she said.
Telstra cut 2800 jobs in the past financial year and plans to shed 550 more as part of a major restructure to its Telstra Enterprise arm, but it denied the changes were a result of adoption of AI.
Ms Brady said it was uncertain what impact AI would have on employment but “come 2030, I would expect Telstra’s workforce to be smaller than it is today”.
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