Payphones are an important public resource and it is vital that the community can rely on clear and fair guidelines for removal or location decisions. The guidelines proposed by the ACMA do not capture all community concerns and are unfairly weighted to commercial considerations. 

Summary: ACCAN maintains that the content of these Guidelines:

• is unfairly skewed to irrelevant commercial considerations of Telstra that have no connection with social benefit;
• fails to give adequate weight to the most relevant community concerns, and;
• is based on metrics that are not transparent, which the community cannot access or understand, and which gives Telstra an all-purpose method to ignore the community if it so wishes.  
  

ACCAN does not accept the  concept of net social benefit used and rejects these Guidelines. We recommend the Guidelines be re-written and a new round of public consultation be undertaken.

Submission to: Australian Communications & Media Authority  

Status: The ACMA has amended the Guidelines taking on board some suggestions from ACCAN. The revised guidelines includes a new assessment criterion that considers the proximity of payphones to important community facilities like schools or national parks.

Download: Payphone (assessment of net social benefit) guidelines [Adobe Acrobat PDF - 71.34 KB]   

Download: Payphone (assessment of net social benefit) guidelines [Word Document - 249.5 KB]