The first security reform...
Should be Fibre to the Premises with always-on encryption for everybody.
Much harder to tap than a pair of copper wires!
Oh, sorry, didn't they mean the end users security?
Australia's telecommunications industry's peak bodies have joined with a broad industry lobby group in the forlorn hope that Australia's Attorney General George Brandis can be persuaded to keep his department out of their networks. In spite of the telco security reforms being referred to as the “Telecommunications Sector …
Actually, fibre is much more cleanly tapped than copper nowadays - tapping copper affects the current (making the tap detectable by anybody who's looking out for it), whereas tapping fibre has no effect on the light stream.
Anyway, government-mandated standards for security in telecomms services is a great idea. We wouldn't have the problem of deliberately unsecured IoT devices proliferating into households if the government simply banned them.
Also, there is a tragedy of the commons issue in that some security risk mitigations provide no direct benefit or advantage, but cost money, whereas if the government mandated all providers implement them then everybody is on a level playing field and the entire industry and its consumers all benefit.
For example, detecting spoofed source IP addresses and dropping the traffic to eliminate DNS amplification DDOS attacks would be a fantastic bit of progress, but it will take government mandating it to get it in:
http://www.internetsociety.org/doc/addressing-challenge-ip-spoofing