Communications Minister Anika Wells is looking at ways to fast-track laws to empower a Triple Zero watchdog to oversee the nation’s emergency phone number, over a year after the Albanese government agreed or offered in-principal support to the recommendations of a review into Optus’ 2023 nationwide network failure.
Speaking on Monday after an Optus outage cut off access to Triple Zero for 13 hours, during which three people died, Wells said work had started to implement the 18 recommendations of last year’s review, but more action was necessary to see those recommendations “delivered in full”.
Communications Minister Anika WellsCredit: Alex Ellinghausen
“The Bean review was designed to make sure that this never happened again, after it happened last time around … it appears here that on the face of it, there has been ineffective implementation of those recommendations by Optus,” Wells said.
Legislation is being drafted to give the regulator role, which already exists, more teeth to enforce compliance, and will be introduced as soon as it is ready. But the window to introduce the bill this year is shrinking as parliament will only sit for four more weeks before it rises in December.
Last Thursday’s outage resulted in over 600 failed calls to emergency services, while three people died. It was the telco’s second major outage following a 14-hour nationwide failure in November 2023 that limited the ability of customers to contact emergency services, use EFTPOS systems or communicate through the network.
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Following the 2023 outage, then-communications minister Michelle Rowland ordered a review led by former Australian Communications and Media Authority chairman Richard Bean. The review’s recommendations included the establishment of a “Triple Zero custodian”, twice yearly testing of the emergency services network by carriers and the mandatory reporting of outages to the Department of Communications or ACMA.
The government agreed to all the recommendations, either in principle or outright, but a third of them have not been introduced almost a year and a half later. During a press conference on Sunday, Optus CEO Stephen Rue could not say which of the report’s recommendations had been implemented by his firm.
Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief Carol Bennett said the Triple Zero custodian laws need to introduced as soon as possible.
