Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025 and thank my colleague Senator Hanson-Young for all the work that she has done with and for the community after this devastating catastrophe. Telecommunications executives and the Labor government will have you believe that the Optus outage in September was a one-off, unfortunate event that can be addressed with some usual Labor tinkering around the edges. So let's be clear: this was the second major outage from Optus in just two years. Optus and the communications minister want us to think that the recurring failures are unlucky accidents or so-called human errors, but we do know better.

The Optus triple 0 outage last month that left hundreds of calls unanswered and that ended up in three deaths was catastrophic. It was a catastrophic failure of privatisation, of marketisation and of corporatisation of essential services. This is the failure of putting profits over people. The system failures are not a surprise. These disasters are not an anomaly, and the problem will not be solved with some minor tweaks or by creating yet another toothless regulatory role. Failures like this are baked into the very systems that created Optus and Telstra. The roots of the problem are privatisation, neoliberalism and the endless pursuit of profit at the expense of people and the planet.

For decades, we have been sold a lie. We have been told that, if we sell off our public assets and services, we will get better, cheaper services. We have been told that the private sector, big business and the billionaires are more innovative and more efficient than public services and public servants, and so, one by one, we flogged off our telecommunication systems, our power grids, our banks, our airlines, our public transport and our care services. And now look around: Who is better off? Who is safer? Who is being served? It is not the people; it is the corporations, it is big business, it is the big banks, and it is the billionaires. One in three corporations don't even pay any tax here, and neither does Optus, as they make billions on billions of dollars in profit. It is governments who are in the pockets of those who fill their pockets with donations that are to blame; it is not only the corporations.

Let's call it for what it is: a decades-long scam cooked up by successive Liberal and Labor governments to transfer public wealth into private hands. The Australian people have paid the price over and over again. Optus's latest catastrophic failures can be added to that invoice. This time, at least three people paid with their lives. And how has the government responded? It has shrugged. It has performed outrage. It has passed the blame. It acts like it has nothing to do with the catastrophes that inevitably come from the privatisation and corporatisation project. Of course, Optus's overpaid executives and the company itself must take responsibility and must be held to account. But Optus and other big corporations will always look to fatten up their profits at the expense of consumers. That is hardwired into the DNA of neoliberalism. That is why corporations exist—to make money while they screw over ordinary people.

Optus is only the latest chapter of this long and shameful story of privatisation. When Telstra was sold, we were promised better competition; instead, Telstra got billion-dollar profits, and rural communities got left behind. When our electricity grid's poles and wires were flogged off, we were told prices would fall. They didn't. Our energy bills continue to soar while the energy giants and billionaires laugh all the way to the banks. When our public transport was outsourced, workers were stripped of their rights and commuters waited longer for trains and buses that often never showed up. The privatised early education and care system is a disaster—a disaster where babies and toddlers have been neglected and abused while CEOs pocket bonuses.