Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Link to 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.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion. There are serious questions to be answered about the triple 0 outages on this government's watch, and, if the minister and government are adamant that they did nothing wrong, why not bring the Australian public into their confidence and share, through a proper and transparent inquiry, what they knew and when they knew it? The government has commissioned ACMA to stage an inquiry, but, as ACMA is part of the failed system, how can it be held to account if it is running the inquiry? Independence is the key here. ACMA's inquiry is not independent.

We must remember the gravity of the issue at hand. We're talking about the loss of lives—four lives lost. Shirking responsibility is not an option. The Australian people deserve to understand what went on, how the system failed and how it will be rectified to ensure this does not happen again in the future. The minister, the department and ACMA must all transparently explain, at an independent inquiry, when they were first alerted to an issue with the triple 0 connectivity and what actions they took. Serious questions remain about welfare checks and whether they were quick and comprehensive enough to identify the full scope of the problem early enough. Did the minister act appropriately in leaving ACMA to investigate, rather than herself swiftly acting on 18 September?

It simply is not good enough to hide behind Optus's indication about the scope of the outage, which, it turns out, significantly understated the problem. The key issue is notification of the problem, not the estimate of the scale of the problem. If someone reports a fire on their property and tells the responsible authority, 'It's okay; it's only a small fire,' do the authorities take that on trust and adopt a small-scale response, or do they deploy all available local resources to make their own threat assessment and prevent it becoming a disaster?

It is imperative that clear processes exist to ensure triple 0 outages are managed swiftly. There must also be resilience in the system to ensure it does not rely on a single point of failure—for example, a telecommunication company's incorrect estimation of the size of an outage. Triple 0 is the service that underpins all emergency service responses, and Australians need to have absolute confidence it is working. This is not the first outage on this government's watch but the second. And remember: this government sat on a recommendation to legislate a triple 0 watchdog, as per the Bean review, for 12 long months.

They also failed to adequately protect Australians from negative outcomes as a result of the 3G network shutdown, which occurred one year ago yesterday. We do not yet know the full scale of the fallout of that shutdown, with reports in the last week of the discovery of certain models of Samsung phones, which do not currently have triple 0 connectivity as a result of the 3G shutdown.

Regional Australians are acutely aware of how their mobile connectivity has deteriorated since telcos chose to turn off 3G on this government's watch. Many have been left with reduced or no connectivity as a result. No connectivity means no net zero—sorry, no triple 0, full stop. That was a very, very—

Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was on the mind.

Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, it is on the mind. Luck will not fix this Labor government's problem with transparency, timely action and responsibility. Australians want to know that when they call triple 0 they will connect; they want to know that the government understands their experience and will act to improve connectivity in the regions; and they want the minister for communications to take responsibility and take action to ensure this is the case. She needs to turn up to the Senate inquiry that will take place.

Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the debate be adjourned.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the debate be adjourned.