Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sport) Share this | Hansard source

As I said in an earlier answer, the information that Optus provided to my office on 18 September was that there had been a minor outage that affected 10 calls, that it had been resolved and, most importantly, that there were no adverse impacts on any persons. With respect to the more catastrophic outage that affected 631 calls, potentially with links to three deaths—potentially four deaths, as we found out on Sunday—I inquired as to the correct process for dealing with families in this situation. I was advised that emergency services is the correct and proper agency that we use to reach out, so that's what happened. I also spoke to the premiers of South Australia and Western Australia, the Chief Minister of the NT and numerous other people across that weekend as we all worked on our collective response.

Of course, I will absolutely meet with affected families if that's what they wish. I am respecting their space. There are many sensitivities here, and I'm not going to make their lives harder by politicising their grief in this place as you have now done two days in a row.

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