I am determined the Senate inquiry I initiated into the catastrophic Optus triple zero outage will uncover the truth.
In the face of Labor misleading Australians about what it knew and when, the Coalition will put the fire to the feet of Optus, the government, the regulator and the hapless Minister for Communications.
Triple zero is a critical life-saving service. A number of Australians died as a result of this outage.
Australians deserve nothing less than the truth about the failure of Optus’s triple zero service. They also deserve to know this catastrophic failure will never happen again.
Minister Wells initially stated she did not know about the outage until Friday 19 September, but we uncovered in Senate estimates her office was notified by email the day before.
She then scrambled to introduce deficient legislation to implement a Triple Zero Custodian after the government failed to act on this and other recommendations for two years.
It is untenable the government and the regulator gave telecommunications carriers six months to make vital improvements to the triple zero service.* These include the obligation on carriers to notify emergency services of triple zero outages in real time and to submit management plans before network upgrades where there is a risk of impact on the emergency call service.
The government must also explain why the recommendation to impose mandatory mobile phone roaming during times of disaster has gone nowhere.
Tomorrow, the first public hearing will get underway at 8.00am in Parliament when Optus executives appear before our committee. They include Chief Executive Officer Stephen Rue, Chairman John Arthur, former Chairman Paul O’Sullivan and Chief Financial Officer Michael Venter. The Chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority will also appear.
The Senate inquiry will examine all of the circumstances surrounding the Optus outage and other triple zero failures, as well as the role of the minister and the government in safeguarding the integrity, resilience and public confidence in the triple zero system.**
We will leave no stone unturned to uncover the truth and hold those responsible to account for what went wrong. That is why the minister must agree to appear before our inquiry.
Australians deserve nothing less.
*The Telecommunications (Emergency Call Service) Amendment Determination 2025 (No. 1) was registered on 29 April 2025 but did not come into effect until 1 November 2025.
** See terms of reference at https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/TripleZero48P