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) (18:40): For the purpose of clarification, I make the point, as I very recently made clear, that the direction will be issued through the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard's delegated legislation.

It's not just a letter from the minister, and I think that that should be made clear. On a technical level, the opposition has also failed to comprehend what an ECS outage event is, which is a much broader concept than a significant local outage. It is a major outage under the ECS determination.

In practice, the coalition is essentially proposing that it require the custodian to maintain a register of every single voice outage or possible outage even if, for example, it only affected one premises for five minutes. We have directed that the public register of network outages build on the current requirements of publicly reported outages and increase transparency and accountability around those outages, and that it be maintained by the telcos themselves.

I provide that explanation for the way that the government will be voting. The TEMPORARY CHAIR ( Senator Grogan ): I put the question that amendment (1) on sheet 3458 be agreed to. A division having been called and it being past 6.30, the division will be deferred to a later date, but we are in a position to continue through these amendments.