CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr GEORGANAS (Adelaide) (10:32): Over generations, Australians have trusted calling triple 0 in times of emergency to connect with police, fire, ambulance and other emergency services. This trust deserves to be respected, and, if telecommunications companies breach this trust, then the Australian public quite rightly expects there to be serious consequences. This is why the September 2025 Optus outage in which hundreds of emergency calls failed and lives were lost is completely unacceptable.

During the outage, thousands of triple 0 calls failed, which has been linked to at least four deaths. My home state of South Australia has, sadly, been impacted by this devastating technical failure. This includes the tragic deaths of an eight-week-old boy from South Australia and a 68-year-old woman from the Adelaide suburb of Queenstown.

In addition, there were two deaths in WA linked to the outage. I'd like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere condolences to the families, friends and communities of the people who died as a result of the Optus outage. This should never, ever have occurred and must never, ever happen again.

What I know will frustrate Australians is that Optus trade very, very successfully on a licence that's been gifted to them by the Australian government and as a result of support from the Australian people. On 22 May, the Australian FinancialReview reported: The telco group's underlying net profit jumped to $136 million in the 12 months to March 31 from $19 million a year earlier … I want to make this point.

The report also says: Optus chief executive Stephen Rue says he will keep a tight lid on costs to improve profit margins at the Singaporean-owned telco group, after annual earnings rebounded following last year's hefty write-downs. But at what cost to the public? The report goes on: The average number of Optus employees fell 8 per cent to 6200 over the 12 months as the telco group cut jobs.

I'd respectfully request that Mr Rue consider carefully how Optus operates in the future to ensure the company lives up to that trust that's been given to Optus by the Australian public. They should be judiciously looking at managing costs. Increasing profits and reducing the number of employees might sound good to shareholders, but, again, at what cost?

Optus must do much better, and we await the findings of ACMA into the tragic failure that resulted in last month's deaths. But I must commend the Minister for Communications and congratulate her for introducing legislation so swiftly. This legislation will provide certainty to Australians that this critical service is reliable and can be trusted by Australians in their most desperate times of need.