Transcript: Rosemary Sinclair interview on Commsday Live

30 September, 2024

Tim Marshall: Welcome, Rosemary. It's great to have you here, and thank you for joining.

Rosemary Sinclair: Thanks, Tim. It's so lovely to be here.

Tim Marshall: Rosemary, through this series, we've been reflecting on how the first 30 years of CommsDay has more or less tracked the history of the first 30 years of the public internet. I think around that time, mid '90s, you were working with the ABC and a well-known publishing company.

Tell me about the first time you came across this thing that they called the internet. What were your thoughts at the time and what's your impression of the huge change we've all seen since that time?

Rosemary Sinclair: The very first time I came across the internet was through the Mosaic browser, looking at a beautiful parrot from a website about birds in South America, and it was a static page, but it was from a museum or some such. And I just stood there astounded, Tim, that I was engaging with content from the other side of the world and that it had just been "type a few keys". I didn't even know how we got to this browser or got through the browser to the website, but there was this material and I just was astounded by it.

It reminded me really of only 10 years earlier when I'd actually been astounded by spreadsheets and desktop computers. So I was that astounded all over again. But it was really an exciting moment, a bit in a funny little way like man on the moon, you think, "oh my gosh, did I actually just see that? Did it really just happen?". So that was my very first.

Tim Marshall: Do you think working, as you were in media with the ABC and publishing at that time, did you have an inkling that it was something big that would transform those industries in the way it has?

Rosemary Sinclair: Yeah, yeah. I did, but not all of my colleagues, Tim, at the same time shared this marvelous vision that I had. In fact, I can remember going to a meeting of the senior folks at the ABC. They said something to me that's been said to me number of times in my life, which is, "why don't you get this, Rosemary? Why are you the only person in the room that does not understand?". On this occasion it was, "we do radio and television around here. We are not doing that online stuff. We do radio and television".

I just thought to myself, as I've thought on a number of occasions, "well, the timing's just not right, because absolutely the idea is right". But it was the usual matter, Tim, of holders of incumbent positions being limited in their framing of new technologies or new issues by what they needed to protect. In that environment, what I needed to protect was the resources I needed to make radio and television.

Tim Marshall: That's great. That's a really interesting insight that you had that kind of foresight, and maybe to lead into this next question of mine. There was a lot going on in that time and there were various degrees of foresight amongst different stakeholders there, for good reasons, as you described. Interested to hear about the reasons that you were attracted to telecommunications in the first place coming out of those spaces. And maybe it was that you could see that there was a big change coming or needed to occur. I've always made the argument that telecommunications is kind of a net good to society. It's an ongoing debate you can probably have on a daily basis, but that's something I've always been able to reflect on in the past. Do you recall what attracted you in the first place?

Rosemary Sinclair: A very practical matter, Tim, that I can share with you because we go back a long way. I needed to pay my way through university. So I took a job with the Postmaster-General's Department at the time in the Dalley Street telephone exchange, connecting telephone calls. So if you wanted to ring Newcastle or Geelong or Fremantle, then you had to ring your telephone exchange operator. I did that so well that I got promoted to the interstate telephone exchange, which was the glamorous life of connecting people to Melbourne and Brisbane and Perth.

Then subsequently through uni holidays, I was part of the introduction of what was very unhappily called subscriber trunk dialling and international subscriber dialling. It was those products and services that really ignited my interest in this amazing sector. Because what we were doing was putting communications in the hands of the consumers.

So now I could, anytime I liked, ring Auntie Beryl in Tamworth and have a bit of a chat to see how she was, or I could hold my crying baby to the phone so my grandma in Italy could hear the baby. So the power of this just really struck me. When I finished doing what I was doing at uni, I thought, "That's really interesting, and that's a really big organisation. I reckon there's probably a spot in there for me. Because now I know that I do not want to dot I's and cross T's as a lawyer for the rest of my life." So I joined the graduate program at what was then Telecom Australia. So that's the nuts and bolts of it.

Tim Marshall: And followed that through waves of innovation and through different directions.

Rosemary Sinclair: Yes

Tim Marshall: It's curious, I wasn't aware of your uni job there as a... operating the switch. It reminds me of a story I've never been able to verify that... I grew up in a very small town in Southern New South Wales. The story goes that one of the neighbouring villages, it was called Cathcart, perishing cold place near Bombala where I grew up, that was host to the last manual exchange in all of Australia, which what must have been, I guess, the possibly the early '80s if not the late '70s.

Rosemary Sinclair: Yes

Tim Marshall: But the legend was that it was just there. I've never been able to verify it. Anyway...

Rosemary Sinclair: Someone somewhere would have a record of those... really the closures, because those telephone exchanges, Tim, were so important to those communities. They really felt it very, very badly when they closed. But the convenience for everybody else of just being able to make your own call was overwhelming.

Tim Marshall: Yeah, interesting. I'm curious about your role as a customer advocate. You were in charge of the Australian Telecommunications Users Group (ATUG), when I think we first met. You held a similar role later in energy. Looking back at those days in telco where broadband competition was in its infancy, it wasn't really a national strategy for future network infrastructure, and you had an insight on a good number of forums looking to address that.

Rosemary Sinclair: Yeah

Tim Marshall: What's your view on how end users were actually considered, as decisions around access and pricing and market structure and investment were being considered?

Rosemary Sinclair: Look, the core feature of the Telco Act is the long-term interests of end users. So it's right up front and centre. Right up front and centre. And then we go on to talk about efficiency and international competitiveness for the industry and the general availability of services that enhance the welfare of Australia. So right up the front end is a view of the importance of consumers. But there was a sense by some, I think, Tim, that they knew what the long-term interests of consumers were, and it wasn't absolutely necessary to listen directly to the pesky consumers who didn't really know what they were talking about.

If you think about the history of the whole industry, it starts out as an engineering industry and it's government run. About the time that these big policy debates were running, it was becoming clear to people that it was about more than just engineering. There's one very funny story when I was at Telecom Australia and we were rolling out the first content services where you could ring and get your horoscope, and ring for a bit more on the weather, and all of that sort of stuff... and we had a very funny plan. Well, when I say funny, it reflected the big CapEx work program, which meant that you'd get an exchange here and an exchange there and an exchange somewhere else, but not a mass or momentum of capability that would support the marketing of their services.

Anyway, I went down to talk to the chief engineer about that, who thumped the table and said to me, "Rosemary, what you don't understand around here..." right - it was just one of those moments.
"... is that I do not want those content services running over my network." I said, "I'm not sure that it's your network, and I think the customers do want these content services. I think that's the way we're going to go." So that direct of the customer, it took a while for it to be established. There was me at ATUG looking at business interest.

The interests of business users were around the competitiveness of them against their international counterparts. At that time, telecommunication services in Australia were very expensive and very, very, very slow to innovate. In fact, one of the first debates that ATUG was not about broadband, it was whether the mobile carriers would allow SMS messages to be sent between carriers, the idea being that you should just be grateful to be able to send an SMS message to someone else on a single network rather than being able to send them from network to network, which of course was a very long way from the kind of competitive environment that the consumers wanted.

On the other hand, there was a little organisation representing consumers, which eventually turned itself into ACCAN. But that residential view around price and service was also a really important part of the policy debate and discussion. If I take myself back then and think forward, there were a few of us that knew that this was all incredibly important. If I put myself in 2020 COVID and look back to what we needed to do, then nobody would argue that the voice of the consumer and the innovation and competitiveness of the industry was absolutely critical because it was what got us through COVID, no doubt about it in my mind.

Tim Marshall: Yeah, it was a long run in to establish what was there and then actually prove itself to be incredibly effective, as we know.

Rosemary Sinclair: Yeah

Tim Marshall: That's really interesting to hear about and we know where the consumer is positioned, right, as you say, right up the front of the legislation and hearing about some of that early resistance. In some ways a very modern concept, isn't it, listening to what someone else's world view might be?

Rosemary Sinclair: Yeah, and I think it was in part... to reflect the importance in the policymakers' minds of consumers. But I think that they were too reliant on supply side initiatives for a very long time. Then I think they had wildly inflated expectations about what markets, left to their own devices, would deliver for end consumers. It took the consumers, both business and households, a while to build the skills and capability to understand how to most effectively represent the issues of concern into those technology and policy debates.

Tim Marshall: I hear you. That's very interesting. So on that, public advocacy over many years has been a real feature of the telco sector. I'll tell you, as a former journo, it made great fodder for media, including at CommsDay. There were some big characters and some of it was a long way from quiet diplomacy, as they say from time to time. What are your reflections on some of that more combative discourse over the years? What do you think are some of the lessons to be learned about how some of those debates were undertaken over the years?

Rosemary Sinclair: Well, for me personally, being a lawyer by a training and being a very amateur philosopher, I don't mind the dialectic. Right, I don't mind being really pushed to the other point of view. I don't much like being shouted at, but I've got five brothers, so I'm perfectly capable of shouting back. So the style of communications WAS not always effective, but pushing around big ideas I think is actually really important.

CommsDay during those times was an incredibly important balancing vehicle, because I always felt, particularly when debates and discussions were getting very, very hot, that I could have my voice heard in a new service that people were listening to and reading. So it was a really important role that CommsDay played, which you might not have realised at the time.

Big ideas, big arguments, I think it was... Some of it came from a very particular context from another country reflecting some philosophies and values that were not immediately lift and shift to Australia. We've been dealing with other problems for a very, very long time, and we deal with them in our own way. Our political process is different. So there were a number of differences that meant that the one-size-fits-all approach from somewhere else was not the go. And indeed it was not the go.

Tim Marshall: I hear you. I think there's something else there. And it's that, look, we certainly had the consumer advocates. And I would say, all right, there's a purity there if I can put it that way. But then among industry, you'll have differing perspectives, but everyone's got their own interest to an extent. Sometimes those battles felt like a battle for the truth on what the national interest was.

Rosemary Sinclair: Mm-hmm. I don't know that there's one flavour or one colour in the national interest. In fact, I think that's one of the lovely things about Australia, that we hold in balance many things at any one time. This all, in a sense, was the thread running through the Hayne Royal Commission on what another sector was doing to its customers. I thought one of the very profound things that Hayne said was that in the long run, the interests of the customers and the shareholders really are at one. And that's how I've always felt about this.

When I think about any issue, I ask myself, "What's happening with the technology? What are the consumers wanting to do? What are the policy and regulatory issues that arise from all of that?" But then I also think, Tim, "How is this going to be funded? Is it going to be funded purely by industry?" That was the problem with broadband. There was no way Australian industry by itself could fund the rollout of that network. It needed government to come in. That was completely at odds with where telecommunications policy had come over the prior 20 years.

Sometimes consumers have to fund. So for example, the rollout of the mobile networks, consumers funded those through crazy high prices, and at the time we were paying twice. We paid for the fixed line and then we paid for the mobile services. You will recall those long lists of calls on Monday to Friday, calls on Saturdays and Sundays, text messages, this and that. That marvellous notion that if you used more data, you were penalised for that. Prices actually went up and not down related to volume. So there was some imaginative economic concepts in all of that. But it went on for 10 years.

Then we got to a point where it was possible, and indeed the right thing, to put the argument that said, "Enough of this, this is supposed to be a competitive industry and now consumers have got to get the benefit of this industry." So that issue of funding... industry, sometimes needs a bit of support from government, sometimes consumers, but it's very important to think about how the marvellous new idea is actually going to be funded.

Tim Marshall: Indeed. Just finally on these matters of consumer interest, you mentioned the COVID experience being kind of a culmination of a lot of investment, but also advocacy over many years to ensure that the consumer needs business and household were front and centre and considered, and it worked really well. Just how important do you think right now, I guess I'm talking about the present, how important is ongoing vigilance and advocacy on behalf of consumers in this industry or any industry for that matter?

Rosemary Sinclair: Well, I'm happy to stick with this industry with a little sideways glance at the energy sector. So I'm doing a little piece of work for the Victorian government at the moment, looking at the responsive energy networks to a terrible storm event in Victoria in the middle of February. 530,000 households lost power for a range of reasons during that event, so the Victorian government wants to have a look at how the networks responded and how the communities feel and so on.

Because I'm completely comfortable with talking with communities, I said, "why don't we go and talk to the communities?". People said, "well, that's a bit dangerous, they're very traumatised." Some people felt they had to bring their own security guards with them. I said, "If we get into trouble, let's have a cup of tea and a scone. We can talk our way through most things over a cuppa and a scone."

We get out there, all set to talk about energy matters and energy networks and the whole box and dice about worst performing feeders, etc. What do people want to talk about, Tim? They want to talk about the fact that the communications went down and they felt absolutely bereft and out of control. They were traumatised, not by the fact that they couldn't turn the lights on, but by the fact that they couldn't ring their family and say, "I'm okay," or, "can I come with the four kids and stay with you for a week because it's going to take that long?" So the focus of the community was on communications as part of their way through what was a terrible incident.

The vast majority of people said to us, "look, we can get by 48 hours without the power. It's not really good when the freezer starts to melt and the food's going off, but the fact of the matter is we can. What we cannot do without for anything more than a nanosecond is access to communications services. So what are you going to do about that?".

So we've spent a lot of time... and of course some of the answer lies with the Regional Telecommunications Inquiry. Some of it lies with the telecommunications resilience work that's going on, how we think about the Universal Service Obligation (USO), Tim. We go all the way back to that core piece of policy and the debate now, well, what is a universal service now? It used to be a copper network telephone, but that's not now. Anyway, it tells me at any rate that there are core policy matters that have a different presentation in a different era with new technologies, but they remain. So being able to be connected, having quality of service, having the service regarded as essential, I don't think they're going to go away anytime.

Tim Marshall: No, and it's curious. Just one reflection that came up there. If we talk about days gone by and the USO, some of that was about equity. But one of the reflections that came out, that insight you gave us there about the people coming out of the storm and the natural disaster and the trauma of that was that it actually was an emotional thing.

Rosemary Sinclair: Yes.

Tim Marshall: That there was actually a feeling that people would have and that actually accentuated the poor experience they were having in their day, it's guttural.

Rosemary Sinclair: Yeah, it's guttural. So that dependence on communications now is... it's profound in people's lives.

Tim Marshall: Very interesting. So you now work at the .au Domain Name Administration, auDA. In fact, you're finishing there, I think, in the coming months. It's interesting that what you're working with there is really another absolutely essential infrastructure layer to enable our world to function. It means you've got some pretty intimate insight into what people do and need online. In fact, your last comments gave us some insight on that, on just basic connectivity. What can you tell me about what people value about the internet in their digital world and how it is important to users these days, whether that's a business or consumer?

Rosemary Sinclair: Yeah, we track this through some research we do called Digital Lives of Australians, and we've been doing that for four years now. Essentially almost 100 per cent of people are saying, "The internet provides value to me." An interesting and growing percentage of people are saying, "I couldn't live without the internet. It's absolutely critical to what I want to do." The way people are using the information is for access to information. It has an economic function now, access to goods and services.

But very importantly, and as we saw with COVID, it's a way of connecting with others beyond the phone call. Now, the platforms and services that are available are enabling people to tell their own stories and to be part of other communities. At auDA, we've got a little grants program where we fund a number of community level grants. Through that grants program, we have such a wonderful lens on how people are using the internet to find their community.
So one of the grants was about young people who have a very particular illness, and the internet has enabled those young people to connect with other young people who have that illness. Just that feeling that, "I'm not alone, that there are other people out there struggling with what I'm struggling with, understanding that I'm good today and bad tomorrow," they tell us that it just makes such a difference to them.

So that funny piece of technology, the connectivity, the protocols, all that mumbo jumbo that goes on, Tim, we finally get to the point that it's really about enabling me to connect with other people, and that's what I really value.

Tim Marshall: Yeah, that's fantastic to hear those reflections, Rosemary. Thank you. Just as we wrap up though, I think some of the issues, I guess this is a bit more serious, that we face now with a maturing online environment... Like some of those earlier telco challenges that you were working through, like competition and coverage and access and price seem almost quaint, I might say. You've also produced a really interesting thought leadership around some future scenarios research as well. What do you think are the big challenges, and I guess on a positive side, opportunities, to get the internet right for the coming years?

Rosemary Sinclair: The first one I really focused on at the moment is cyber security and people's actual lived experience. Now, about three quarters of Australians have had an experience with a phishing email, a scam of one sort or another, text message, 'Help mum, I need you to send me $500." So we've got a very significant majority of people who have had that experience. The worrying thing for the moment, Tim, is it's making people lose confidence and start to just dial back their level of activity of that sort on the internet.

That's at a time, of course, where other people are talking about the marvels of productivity and using these technologies to really kick along GDP and so on. So we've got to get that sorted out. There are range of strategies around that, and we'll make progress on that. There's a big global discussion about coordination and resolving these matters.

The other one is the misinformation-disinformation debate. Now, that's not an auDA matter because we don't play in content areas, but it... If Australians are using the internet for information, then quality information is really important. There are many levers on this one, part of it is critical thinking through the education system, right from the get-go, giving people that message on a different technology platform but don't talk to strangers. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. The work that the eSafety Commissioner is doing... is part of that. Again, there are big global debates, and I'm confident enough to think that we'll sort that out. But that would be the other big issue that I'd raise.

Tim Marshall:
Indeed. And finally, Rosemary, as we wrap up, given this as a kind of a celebration of CommsDay, what are your reflections perhaps on CommsDay, but maybe more broadly, what's your reflections on the role of media in business and policy development generally? How do you see that?

Rosemary Sinclair:
Yeah. Well, I think the broad question, the answer to the broad question, is that media is very important in bringing information and debates. But I'd prefer to reflect on CommsDay actually, because I think CommsDay is a bit of an exemplar from my point of view on the role the media should be playing in supporting these big debates and discussions. I always felt that then, and I feel now as CommsDay comes into my inbox, Tim, that the editorial stance is very much one around facts and accuracy and integrity. And I just feel that's absolutely critical.

I spent some time at the ABC, I spent some time on the Australian Communications and Media Authority. So I've had time, I've had the opportunity to think about editorial stance. And I think the editorial stance of CommsDay is critical. With that, the impartiality, the balance of perspectives, that was directly critical to some work that I was doing in the sector some time ago. But when I read CommsDay, I don't have to think, whose perspective are they peddling? What's behind this story? Why is this story here and is there some other story that I should be aware of?. I don't have to think about that. I know that I'm getting the complete package and I can just work my way through.

The other thing I'm loving at the moment is the history of the issues. You know, 10 years ago… Sometimes I am just caught by surprise. I think, I can't believe that was 10 years ago. Just extraordinary. My very last comment, if I went back to CommsDay 2001 when I took up the role at ATUG and I picked up today's CommsDay and reflected on the breadth of issues that CommsDay's covering, there's really a mirror, if you like, in CommsDay about the development of the digital economy.

The range of issues that are being discussed, including cables into the Pacific, it's just such a reflection of how the whole sector has matured and become such an integral part of everything we do, the way we live our lives, work, play.

Tim Marshall: Thank you so much for those kind words, Rosemary Sinclair. Thank you so much for being with us today and sharing those reflections and best wishes for your remaining time at auDA and whatever comes next.

Rosemary Sinclair: Thanks, Tim. I've really enjoyed the discussion, as I've enjoyed many discussions with you over many years. This has been another terrific experience. Thanks very much, and thanks to CommsDay.

Tim Marshall: Thank you, Rosemary.