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

I rise today to speak on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025. What a disgraceful display of behaviour by those opposite, refusing to have scrutiny in this parliament when it comes to the triple 0 network and allowing all those Australians who have experienced triple 0 outages, our emergency services personnel to have their say, or to have light shone onto the disasters that have been happening in the triple 0 network—the crisis of the triple 0 network.

We are here today discussing this because we have a rushed piece of legislation. It's policy on the run in its worst form. This legislation is far from perfect. If it had been moved to 18 months ago—even 12 months ago—would it have stopped the September outage, when four lives were lost? We haven't even had time, because it came to us with less than 24 hours notice to stress test or scenario test it. Those scenario tests will now have to happen in real life, and with that come extraordinary risk as to whether the legislation will actually work.

We are only debating this today because of the catastrophic Optus outage that happened on 18 September this year. This was no ordinary outage. This outage went on for around 13 hours. It was completely undetected. People in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were unable to call triple 0 in their greatest time of need. There were warning signs that this was going to happen, but those were ignored. There were customer complaints to the Optus call centre from people who couldn't connect to triple 0, yet none of these raised an immediate red flag. It astounds me that anyone who calls their telco provider saying they can't get through to triple 0 is not taken seriously. It is completely unacceptable.

From the information we have right now, more than 600 calls failed to connect with emergency services during that 13-hour outage. But we don't know if that is all. We don't know with any certainty how many more there might be. Tragically, as I said, four people lost their lives. Their families and their friends are mourning the loss of their loved ones. This is not politics; this is real life. People have died. And it breaks all of our hearts here. I cannot emphasise enough how absolutely and unequivocally unacceptable this outage was, and the way it was handled by everyone involved is a disgrace. Optus has failed Australians. They have failed in not detecting this abhorrent error in their systems, which denied Australians in emergency situations connection to help—help that we promise will be there in people's greatest time of need. This is a service which the minister yesterday agreed is the most critical service in our telecommunications system. Optus also failed to tell Australians what was going on for more than 32 hours after this catastrophic failure of their network. They have failed to be open and transparent about what actually went wrong.

On Saturday 19 September, the CEO of Optus, Stephen Rue, promised he would provide daily updates. He fronted of the media just three more times—then radio silence. I have tried to secure a meeting with the CEO twice now—more radio silence. He did have time to meet with the minister yesterday and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young. I hope they had a nice cup of tea. Optus have said this was human error. What does this even mean? Did someone forget to flick a switch, plug something in or code something correctly in their systems upgrade? What was this error, and how can we ensure it doesn't happen again? It is everyone's guess right now, because no-one is talking—19 days on, we know a little more than we did on the evening of 19 September.

But Optus are not the only ones who have failed here. They are not the only ones whose systems are broken. The department of communications and the regulator, ACMA, have also failed. Exactly what did they do with the first notifications that came through on 18 September from Optus? Optus had to let them know by law. What on Earth did they do with the subsequent emails that Optus sent that provided updates on the outage? These are the questions that I have been asking for three weeks, yet the department and the regulator, ACMA, are unwilling to speak about it. That old adage that silence is the greatest admission of guilt has never been more true. Worse—the Albanese Labor government have been praying that this would just go away. In fact, the Minister for Communications has found plenty of time to go to New York and the AFL grand final in Melbourne and attend last week's NRL grand final in Sydney, just to name a few. We have the selfies to prove it. But she didn't have time to tell you, the people of Australia, who are dependent on triple 0 in your greatest time of need, what she is doing to protect you and to fix this broken triple 0 system.

Yesterday in question time, the Minister for Communications was asked to confirm that neither she nor her office was notified of the catastrophic outage that occurred on Thursday 18 September before the afternoon of 19 September when Optus advised the media. The minister stood here, right across from where I am now and said:

Yes; I can confirm we were not notified of the catastrophic outage until late afternoon on Friday 19 September.

Let me tell you where that story falls apart. On 25 September, David Swan from the Age newspaper published a story titled 'The emails that reveal how Optus downplayed the triple zero disaster'. In this article, Mr Swan cites two emails sent by Optus to the minister's staff at 2.45 pm and 2.52 pm on Thursday 18 September—a whole day prior to what the minister stood here yesterday in question time and told the Australian public was when she knew about it.

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