Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025

Senator ANANDA-RAJAH (Victoria) (12:22): I rise in support of the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Triple Zero Custodian and Emergency Calling Powers) Bill 2025 in favour of the establishment of a triple 0 custodian. The triple 0 network is a piece of critical infrastructure. It's as important as having clean water.

Why? Because it saves lives. It must be the most resilient part of our telecommunications system, and, instead, right now it seems to be the weakest link, the most fragile part.

That's something that we want to address. Every time the network goes down, it undermines public confidence and it puts people at risk. I know this all too well because I was on the receiving end of those triple 0 calls when I practised.

I was the one in the hospital fielding those patients who came in in extremis. And it was in extremis. It would be patients who, for example, were unable to breathe, due to pulmonary oedema, which is water on the lungs, or younger people who had acute asthmatic episodes.

These patients don't have hours; they have minutes. Then, of course, there are those who may be struggling with the early signs of a stroke or a heart attack. These patients do not have hours; they have minutes.

When they ring triple 0, they need to be connected to medical expertise so that they are picked up and brought to a hospital where they can receive life-saving care. That's what this is all about. It's about saving the lives of Australians in their moment of desperate need.

This disaster that we're all familiar with now and that occurred only a few weeks ago in September 2025 resulted in approximately 600 triple 0 calls failing. It was linked to, we think, at least four deaths. There is context to this.

It goes much further than what happened in September, which was egregious. In November of 2023, 10 million people were also affected by an Optus outage. That included 500,000 businesses.

Included in that were 2,000 triple 0 calls. I'm not aware of whether there were any deaths associated with that outage, but it certainly did undermine confidence. It shook confidence in the system.

It impacted public safety, personal finances and, of course, the broader economy. I don't know many people who were untouched by that outage. What it meant from our government's perspective was that, the very next day, the then communications minister, Michelle Rowland, initiated a review into the whole system.

It was led by a former deputy chair of ACMA, Richard Bean, and it came to be known as the Bean review. It was done rapidly. They were 18 recommendations in that review, and we as a government accepted each and every one of those recommendations.

One of those recommendations was to establish the Triple Zero Custodian, which we did in an administrative manner within the department in March of this year. This bill is really about building resilience into the system and granting longevity, certainty and permanence to that Triple Zero Custodian and, importantly, granting it powers. But, during estimates not long ago, it became evident that we inherited a system that was far worse than we thought.

In 2018, under the then coalition government, there was another outage. This was when both the Optus and Telstra networks went down. We know that about 4,000 triple 0 calls were caught up in that outage.

I am not aware of whether any patients died or were harmed during that period of time. We simply don't know. It is lost in the mists of time.

But I did probe the officials from the department during Senate estimates, and this is what one of the senior officials from the department of communications said: The thing that I found striking, as somebody with, as I say, extensive regulatory experience, and as a former regulator, was just how little focus there was on actual regulation—direct law reform.

In other words, very little was done as a result of that outage in 2018. In fact, the testimony provided by those officials who fronted estimates made it clear that the seeds of these disasters, both in 2023 and in September of this year, were sown many, many years ago by the inaction of the then coalition government. Some days in this place I feel like a housewife.

I should just come in here with a dishcloth. All I do at home is clean. I pick up my kids' crap, I do the laundry, I mop the floors, I do the vacuuming and I even brush the dog.

But, in this place, I feel like I'm doing the same, except this time I'm walking around with not a dishcloth but a pen and, instead of cleaning a house, I have the parliament. This is my house, but we're still doing the same old stuff. We're cleaning up after the Liberals' mess, except the consequences are in fact deadly to the Australian people.

So what does this triple zero custodian do? Firstly, let's go back to the basics. The triple 0 communication call is our most critical of communication services.

When Australians dial triple 0, the call must connect every single time, not just sometimes. Carriers already have legal obligations to carry emergency calls. The problem really is one of oversight, coordination and speed of response when things go wrong.

What are the facts of the case? We know that the fault—or most likely a series of faults, as these things don't happen in isolation—is usually a system problem that leads to such a catastrophe. But we know that the fault lies with Optus.

The government has directed ACMA to investigate. They are currently undertaking a review of that particular outage from September, and we await those findings. But we know—and this was evident from questioning during Senate estimates—that, when an outage does occur, the calls are meant to divert to an alternative carrier.

That's standard operating practice. In this situation, that did not occur. These people were effectively stranded on an island of desperation.

There was no fail-safe; the fail-safe failed. And that fault lies with the carrier—with the company Optus. This same company, incidentally, paid no tax on its $8.2 billion of revenue.

The last time Optus paid tax—and I did look this up—was five years ago, in 2020. But, ever since then, they've paid no tax, and yet they've had revenues of over $8 billion. Incredibly, when you look a little bit deeper in the media reporting, in the last financial year alone the Australian based executives and directors at Optus received a combined nearly $19 million in overall pay.

Was that an increase or a decrease in light of the previous outages? It turns out, incredibly, that it was an increase. They got a 24 per cent bump in their pay in this 12-month period, compared to the one before.

So we have two major network outages in two years and one data breach in 2022—also Optus—and their executives, instead of getting a pay strike, get a pay rise. If this were medicine, they would be deregistered. No doctor would survive the Medical Board if this were the degree of negligence.

They would be struck off. But, instead, for a corporate like Optus, they continue to rake in the profits, they give their executives a pay rise and they take us for a ride. That's what they think.

The justification for this executive pay rise, according to a spokesman from Optus, was that they had expanded their board to strengthen governance and oversight of the company. This would be comical if it weren't so lamentable. It is an absolute disgrace.

Sometimes I feel, reading this sad story, that we are in an episode of Utopia—except we're not. It's reality and it's dystopian. It seems that, in corporate Australia—at least in Optus—incompetence pays, doesn't it?

Incompetence pays. Who's taken the fall? Has the board gone?

Has there been a pay strike against Optus? I haven't heard anything. We need to step in, as a federal government and as a parliament, to right this wrong and ensure it never happens again.

There must be strong disincentives baked into this legislation to ensure no corporate takes Australians for a ride that results in the most egregious of harms, which is, of course, death. The Bean review exposed vulnerabilities across the triple 0 chain. There were vulnerabilities in accountability and coordination.

So, in March this year, we went about establishing the Triple Zero Custodian administratively within the department and started to fix those gaps. But what was evident—again, I refer to the testimony from the official during estimates—was that this was all well and good, but two things were lacking. The first was that the custodian needed powers, and the second was that ACMA, which is the telecommunications regulator, needed the ability to gather data rapidly and use its powers to act rapidly in the public's interest.

The idea with the custodian is essentially for it to have an almost real-time auditor role, linked closely to the department and to ACMA, and, when things go wrong, ACMA can step in and compel the carriers to do better—to respond to problems before they morph into full-blown crises. We have enshrined the Triple Zero Custodian in law to make sure that oversight is permanent, clear and active during both outages and business as usual.

We've empowered ACMA with new statutory powers to safeguard triple 0, enabling it to issue binding directions to carriers and carriage service providers and to demand that information be provided rapidly. But, importantly, as far as the disincentives go for this sort of behaviour, we're introducing civil penalties so that failures to provide information or comply with directions during an outage attract more than a line item in the budget of a corporate giant that it is raking in billions and not paying tax.

Putting people at risk cannot be seen as the cost of doing business. I would also urge the minister to consider the operating licence of Optus. I don't know why this company is still operating in Australia.

It defies belief, given the kind of profession I came from, where you would be struck off. You would not be allowed to step into a hospital or anywhere else. Finally, I would say that when the phone rings Australians need to know that there is someone on the other side who has their back and that the call will be answered every single time, no excuses.

I commend this bill to the House.