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

I seek leave to move the following motion:

That the House:

(1) notes:

(a) the Senate has passed a motion to establish an inquiry, to be conducted by the Environment and Communications References Committee, on the triple zero outages of 18 September 2025, with the committee to report by 11 February 2026;

(b) the Senate has requested that its resolution on this matter be communicated to the House;

(c) on 8 October 2025, the Government blocked a motion moved by the Member for Lindsay to establish a select committee to be known as a House Select Committee on the Triple Zero Ecosystem to inquire into and report on the health of the triple zero ecosystem;

(d) the Opposition expedited the passage of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025 through the House upon a motion first moved by the Opposition; and

(e) the recommendations of the Australian Government review into the Optus outage of 8 November 2023 (the Bean Review) have still not been fully implemented by the Government; and

(2) requires:

(a) the Minister for Communications, as a House Minister, to fully cooperate with the inquiry and appear in person to outline in full her role in the serious outages that have occurred in the triple zero ecosystem; and

(b) that the Minister provide transparency around the failure of the Government to ensure that the legal obligations of telecommunications providers to enable emergency services calls at all times are met.

Leave not granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Member for Lindsay from moving the following motion immediately:

That the House:

(1) notes:

(a) the Senate has passed a motion to establish an inquiry, to be conducted by the Environment and Communications References Committee, on the triple zero outages of 18 September 2025, with the committee to report by 11 February 2026;

(b) the Senate has requested that its resolution on this matter be communicated to the House;

(c) on 8 October 2025, the Government blocked a motion moved by the Member for Lindsay to establish a select committee to be known as a House Select Committee on the Triple Zero Ecosystem to inquire into and report on the health of the triple zero ecosystem;

(d) the Opposition expedited the passage of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025 through the House upon a motion first moved by the Opposition; and

(e) the recommendations of the Australian Government review into the Optus outage of 8 November 2023 (the Bean Review) have still not been fully implemented by the Government; and

(2) requires:

(a) the Minister for Communications, as a House Minister, to fully cooperate with the inquiry and appear in person to outline in full her role in the serious outages that have occurred in the triple zero ecosystem; and

(b) that the Minister provide transparency around the failure of the Government to ensure that the legal obligations of telecommunications providers to enable emergency services calls at all times are met.

Mr Speaker, people died when they couldn't call triple 0 during that Optus outage, and the Albanese Labor government has had multiple chances to come in here. We have moved amendments. We have suspended standing orders. We have reached out to the minister and offered our assistance in coming to a solution so that this never happens again. Yet the government and the Greens have teamed up to block increased penalties for telcos who do the wrong thing. We moved amendments three times. Three times the government had opportunities to increase those penalties from $10 million. We said it should be $40 million. They did a dirty deal with the Greens and now we're at $30 million. But we gave them that chance. This could have been done weeks and weeks ago.

Shame on the government for failing every Australian in this country and not holding telcos to account for their failures. The Albanese Labor government teamed up with the Greens and blocked each and every coalition amendment on the bill that would have forced those telcos to pay for their mistakes. They blocked the coalition's amendment for a public triple 0 outage register. They have, however, instructed ACMA to change the industry standard to require the telcos to publish this data, not publicly but on their own website—so, multiple telcos publishing their own outages. Do you think that's really going to happen?

These are the very telcos, like Optus, who failed to detect an outage for almost 13 hours and then failed abysmally at every turn to provide notifications of the outage to everyone. Every update that they provided to the minister, to her office, to the Department of Communications and to ACMA, the regulator, was wrong. How on Earth can Australians have their confidence in the triple 0 network restored when the Albanese Labor government is choosing to outsource this work right back to the very telcos that have failed to uphold it?

Even worse, the reporting mechanisms created by the triple 0 custodian bill are absolutely useless. The bill requires a report to be produced every six months by the new custodian and ACMA, but the reports won't be publicly available. People won't know what is in those reports. Both the coalition and Senator Payman called for this amendment in the other place, but the Albanese government and the Greens blocked both amendments. I, along with so many Australians, am disgusted at the actions of the Albanese government on this matter of protecting Australians.

Yesterday the Senate supported the establishment of a Senate inquiry into the absolutely catastrophic Optus outage that occurred in September. I moved a motion in this place three weeks ago that would have established a House inquiry that could have already been underway. Parliament has now wasted three weeks in getting on with the job. Those on the other side of the chamber chose to block that inquiry, despite its being supported by the coalition and the full crossbench. This is despite the Standing Committee on Communications, the Arts and Sport having absolutely nothing to do, as was revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday.

Rather than have common sense prevail and put the safety and wellbeing of all Australians first, this arrogant and transparency-phobic Albanese government have tried to dodge a bullet, but they've failed. The Senate inquiry established will use all its powers to interrogate not just Optus but also the Department of Communications, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and any other relevant and involved stakeholder.

Relevant stakeholders, I will point out, include the Minister for Communications. I expect that a request for the minister to attend a committee hearing will arrive very soon. I don't have to use any psychic abilities to foreshadow what will happen; I can guess that the minister won't be available. I think that's a pretty strong prediction. There will be some sporting event or international travel commitment that will prevent her from attending. They love scrutiny on that side of the House, which leads me to the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025. You can duck and you can weave and you can stack the numbers in this place all you like. You can't dodge the Senate inquiry on this matter. I've no doubt that the government will try.

Just the other day, there were media reports on yet another triple 0 outage in Gippsland, Victoria. According to the ABC, a 70-year-old retired nurse discovered the triple 0 network outage after she attempted to call an ambulance when she had a fall. Her call, just like more than 600 calls back in September, failed to connect. Optus have advised my office that this outage was due to a site upgrade in the area. But what concerns me is the apparent lack of communication to the community that services may be impacted. People didn't know. In the current environment, after so many catastrophic failures, failures that have cost Australia, communication outages, planned or unplanned, should be at the forefront of every telco's mind.

When it comes to the Senate inquiry, it needs to be about the full ecosystem. The inquiry needs to ask the question: how can a telco receive millions of dollars in government contracts at the same time as potentially having to pay millions of dollars in fines for letting down Australians? That just doesn't stack up. Every single Australian will be asking how they can get away with that. The inquiry needs to look at every single telco and what they do to ensure the safety of Australians.

It is unconscionable that a human error within a telco could cause a complete failure where hundreds of people could not call our most essential triple 0 service. How can a process error cause such disaster? What is happening within these companies? Where is the accountability? How can ACMA, the regulator, be the investigator in this matter when they are caught up in the failed process? ACMA knew about the outage on the Thursday. By law, Optus had to alert them. Yet, the minister didn't know about the outage until the Friday. Multiple emails went to ACMA and to the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts, yet the minister didn't know. How can ACMA investigate itself? There needs to be a thorough independent investigation, which is what we on this side, the coalition, have been calling for all along.

More communication, not less, is required to ensure that every Australian is informed and can take appropriate steps to protect themselves. More needs to be done. What will it take for the Albanese Labor government and telcos to take this seriously and put the needs of all Australians first, protecting the triple 0 network from these outages? There is nothing more important, no other higher priority, for a government than to protect its own citizens.

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