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

Senator GREEN (Queensland—Assistant Minister for Tourism, Assistant Minister for Pacific Island Affairs and Assistant Minister for Northern Australia) (12:44): I am happy to provide a longer form answer in regard to the process that we've undertaken since the outage at Optus, which we responded to and commissioned the Bean review for. Of course, as you are fully aware, that review was commissioned by our former minister for communications, and we ensured that that review could provide holistic recommendations beyond what an ACMA review may undertake so that we could certainly provide some support for or some reform of this area.

We received those recommendations and those reviews on the date you indicate, but, of course, since that time there has been an implementation of recommendations throughout the review. There have been a number of recommendations implemented. The Triple Zero Custodian was implemented administratively in the department itself, and we undertook consultation on the operation, the powers and the best form for this custodian to undertake.

We undertook that with industry so that we could develop the bill that you see before us today. As you indicate, there has been, despite the findings and the very well-established fine against Optus for its previous outage, a tragic outage recently. That is why the government is bringing forward this bill today—to implement the Triple Zero Custodian in law to ensure that there are increased powers, particularly for the ACMA but also to establish the Triple Zero Custodian under law.