ARCIA Participate in the Development of the New Radiocommunications Bill.

The ARCIA Executive team have been involved in discussions and working groups during the development of the new Radiocommunications Bill.

In early June, the documents were released by the Department of Communications & Arts and contained a draft copy of the proposed new Act as well as several explanatory documents. ARCIA was also invited to a special information session to explain the changes.

ARCIA will be responding to the documents, but in general terms, are comfortable with the proposals contained in the Act, some of which include:

• Removal of the present Apparatus licence, Spectrum licence and Class licence classifications and instituting a single licence format
• Introduction of civil actions for some areas of non-compliance rather than criminal actions, this should make interference management easier
• Opening the way for mediation in many areas of licence issue and interference management
• Easier introduction of secondary markets to facilitate spectrum trading
• The new system moves away from the mandatory standards regime from Standards Australia and allows the ACMA to set ’Equipment rules’ to guide technical requirements.
• The ACMA will be able to expand the ‘Accredited persons’ system to cover more areas if they see a need
• There is provision for recognition of ‘Industry codes’ as part of the requirements.

If you wish to comment or look into the new proposals, the details are available at here and if you wish to comment you can either lodge responses directly with DoCA or send them to ARCIA for inclusion in our response.