This week in Canberra the Coalition Opposition’s focus has rightly been on the second Triple Zero outage on the Albanese Labor Government’s watch.

Optus was responsible for both outages but given the first outage occurred in 2023, the government has had plenty of opportunity to fix the system.  Richard Bean conducted a review on the first outage, which recommended reforms 18 months ago, including creating a Triple Zero Custodian.

Sadly it took the tragic deaths of 4 Australians due to Optus’ second outage last month for the Albanese Government to bring legislation into the Parliament to properly establish the Custodian.

As Shadow Minister for Communications, I moved amendments to ensure the Custodian had specific duties to review poor regional connectivity and how it puts lives at risk.

The ‘camp on’ arrangements for Triple Zero currently mean that if your mobile signal on, say, Optus fails when making a Triple Zero call, your call switches to Telstra to ensure the call gets through.

You’re probably already thinking it – that’s well and good where there’s a second carrier with reliable signal in the area.  We all know across regional Australia we struggle to find one reliable signal, let alone two.

Triple Zero is Australia’s most trusted brand and we need to maintain confidence that when regional Australians call Triple Zero, they will get the help they need.

The Communications Minister ducked and weaved all week in Canberra in response to my questions in Question Time, pretending the situation was entirely Optus’ fault.

Optus are clearly at fault, but the convention in our Australian democracy is clear – the buck stops with the Minister.  This is Optus’ second major outage on Labor’s watch, not the first.

While speaking about emergency services, I want to give a shoutout to our emergency services personnel, particularly volunteer firefighters, state emergency services, police and ambulance officers.  They do a very difficult and sadly, at times, thankless job.  Thank you.

The Fire Danger Period will soon be upon us, usually starting at the end of October.  With recent Triple Zero outages front of mind, and let’s all do our part to be bushfire ready and keep our loved ones and neighbours safe.