Lack of Clarity in Critical Infrastructure Bill Increasingly Alarms Telcos

A new critical infrastructure bill that created what is described by telcos as ill-defined obligations are making big telecommunication companies more apprehensive since there is a lack of clarity in the said bill. This bill itself is a duplication of the prevailing sectoral security rules in the telcos’ perspective.

The giants such as Telstra and Optus along with Communications Alliance were present in the parliamentary joint committee hearing last Friday. They elaborated their concerns with the Security Legislation Amendment (Critical Infrastructure) Bill 2020 and the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018.

An extensive strip of the economy from energy to transport to telecoms, from data storage to space industries, is largely affected by this so-called “positive obligations” created out of the bill which is imposed on the owners of critical infrastructures.

According to Gary Smith, Optus Head of Regulatory Compliance, the proposed law highly depends on future delegated decisions by the minister or departmental secretary. This is what he is explaining at the hearing, “At this stage, the framework in our view is not adequately developed to allow us to understand the impact, and as to plan and prepare for the environment. So much of the detail is left to both subsequent delegated decisions by the minister or secretary or by the proposed co-design process.”

Smith goes further saying, “I’ve certainly been involved in briefing our executive management and board and in seeking to impress upon them the priority and urgency of these matters but once it gets down to saying, well, what do we need to do? What do we need to prepare? It starts to get very difficult to say. Well, we have to do X or Y because so much is put off to this future process or subsequent delegated decisions.”

“Even the definitions that are within the bill at the moment, such as the critical infrastructure asset definition in the case of telecommunications, are so very broad as to encompass just about everything in our businesses. And that’s fairly challenging because we would probably argue that there is a subset of our assets which are the critical infrastructure assets.”

These criticisms as well resonate with Telstra. James Toole, Government Relations Principal emphasises that the telecommunications industry is already bound by the Telecommunications Sector Security Reforms (TSSR), a mature security regime.

On this he remarks, “We think the TSSR regime already does capture a lot of the measures that are proposed under this specific piece of legislation. And we think that the TSSR is quite a robust and mature framework and it concerns us at the moment that the critical infrastructure legislation would make a range of obligations on the telecommunication industry. We think there should be action to address that duplication.”