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

Senator HANSON-YOUNG (South Australia—Manager of Australian Greens Business in the Senate) (12:56): I'm glad to see the government's up for increasing penalties at some point, but this is because you've been dragged kicking and screaming to this; let's be honest. You haven't put forward this other bill, by the way. The bill that you'd like the penalties put in is a bill that was before the Senate in the last term of government, and it kept being bumped down the list and bumped down the list.

You haven't prioritised it, and now it still isn't even before the Senate. It's still in the House. I urge the government—if you're serious about this, you've got to send the right message about what you're prioritising.

Either you're prioritising holding these corporations to account and making sure they know that these types of penalties are going to hit them hard, or you're sending weasel words through the department and through the regulator so the corporation thinks, 'We'll just get a slap on the wrist.' That seems to be what has happened thus far. There are some other important amendments that have been put forward today to this bill, which include making sure that there is transparency when outages happen—making sure that we know that they happened and they're not hidden from the public.

What we've seen with the Optus fiasco—the deadly outage where people couldn't call the ambulance and, sadly, three people lost their lives—is that, when things go wrong, the phone company scrambles to downplay, to obfuscate and to not even inform the right people. It is just appalling that we have a situation where a telecommunications company, which is only able to operate because it has an Australian licence issued by the Australian government, thinks that it can downplay the seriousness of three deaths because people couldn't call triple 0.

They didn't give the full figures. They didn't give them in a timely manner. Rather than telling the minister, the regulator or the state premiers what happened, they were busy making sure their board members knew what was going on.

And where is their board? The board isn't even in Australia, because this company is owned by the Singapore owned Singtel. So they weren't even interested in making sure Australians knew; they were more interested in making sure their ducks were lined up back in Singapore.

So transparency is essential. Transparency is critical in this space. Optus has shown it cannot be trusted.

Optus has shown it can't be trusted to deliver the service, to say what has happened, to be upfront about its failings and to tell the right people. I'd like to ask the minister whether the government is considering a review of Optus's licence given how extraordinary and deadly this failure was. Has the government started a review of Optus's licence?