Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

Whether you're on the benches, in the gallery or anywhere across Australia, when you call triple 0 in your greatest time of need, you expect your call to be answered. But, sadly, three weeks ago people's calls were not answered, and four people have died. There have been many questions of Optus over these last three weeks, but there are also questions of the government. Why did the minister appoint ACMA the regulator and then choof off to New York?

Here we are three weeks later, and all of a sudden it's so urgent for us to rush through legislation to protect Australians. ACMA should not be the investigator in this case. ACMA was part of the failed process. ACMA heard of the Optus outage on Thursday, but the minister says she did not know about it until Friday. Why is that? Why is the minister appointing ACMA as the investigator? Australians deserve a thorough independent investigation into the whole triple 0 network. We should also have an assurance that there's transparency in the system. There needs to be a register that records every single triple 0 outage so Australians can have confidence that, when they pick up the phone in their greatest time of need, they get an answer. Right now, the government should be protecting every single Australian, not spending their time on overseas jaunts.

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