Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has slammed the government for their response to the Optus Triple Zero outage, saying Communications Minister Anika Wells has been absent in the response to the crisis.
“We are asking the government what on earth is going on … when lives are on the line, you don’t side with the telcos. You don’t jet off to New York. You don’t cover up your failures. These are three things the communications minister has actually done,” Ley told ABC News this morning.
Yesterday the opposition unsuccessfully moved to establish a house select committee to investigate the outage, and failed to attach amendments to Triple Zero custodian legislation that would see a public register of outages established and double penalties for offending telcos.
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“Why wouldn’t the minister support a parliamentary inquiry to find out what is going on in the 000 system? This is 2025. Not 1925. Australians deserve answers. People have died. The minister has pointed the finger at everyone but the processes that she, as minister, is responsible for. So we are asking the questions of this government because ultimately it’s their responsibility,” Ley said.
“Pointing the finger at Optus is all well and good and we actually support stronger penalties. So, she didn’t support the stronger penalties that we proposed … I don’t believe those penalties are strong enough,” she said.
The government moved this week to legislate $10 million penalties for offending telcos, with the opposition unsuccessfully attempting to double the penalty to $20 million as the legislation moved through the House of Representatives.
“Australians expect the Triple Zero network to work and a government is effectively not bringing an inquiry to find out what went on and how we prevent this in the future because this is not just about what happened when people died as a result of this outage. This is actually about making sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s what the Coalition is focused on,” Ley said.
Opposition communications spokesperson Melissa McIntosh will meet with Optus chief executive Stephen Rue today. Rue has already met with Wells and Greens communications spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young.
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