Ms Helen Dixon:

This is a very active area of regulatory activity by ComReg. We established a nuisance communications industry taskforce in 2022 to look at the complexity of issues in how to block those scam calls and SMS messages. We came up with six interventions with industry. We consulted extensively on them and we have now published a decision that requires these six interventions to be implemented by all operators. Five are interventions that relate to voice calls and one relates to a sender ID registry related to SMS messages. As the Senator may know, we conducted our own research on the harms that arise from nuisance communications and, as the Senator referenced, there are psychological and emotional harms as well as the financial issues that arise from fraud. Those six interventions now fall to be implemented by the operators. We have had a good response from operators committing to implementing them. We hope this will see a reduction in what we describe as a scourge. It is a significant issue but one on which ComReg has a major focus.