“Let me be clear, Optus must be held accountable for this incident. Unfortunately, the first time my government heard about this was late on Friday afternoon, and since then, we’ve sought urgent briefings and have been advised from several organisations, St John’s, ambulance and police.”
Health Infastructure Minister John Carey.Credit: Hamish Hastie
Senior minister John Carey said the incident was “absolutely shocking”.
“It is shocking and it is completely unacceptable that peoples’ lives have been put at risk and of course, with deep sadness I can confirm that one 74-year-old man has passed away and so the advice given to me is this matter will be referred to the coroner’s court for investigation,” Carey said at a press conference on Saturday morning.
“This news is only recent so I need to assure you, we find this absolutely shocking. It is unbelievable and the way that Optus has even just released the news I think is appalling, so my view is Optus should be condemned but now we have to work through what is flowing out from this.
“What I can say is that WA Police are now making safety checks of all the calls that did not get through.
“What is clear is that this has now put a risk to peoples’ lives. People were trying to call 000 and could not. I join the South Australian premier – this is shocking, it is appalling and clearly it is also of deep sorrow that a man has passed.”
WA Premier Roger Cook.Credit: Hamish Hastie
Asked if he supported re-naming Optus Stadium, Carey said he just wanted to “focus on the issue at hand” and concentrate on the welfare checks.
The failure affected about 600 Optus customers in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
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Western Australia’s opposition emergency services spokesman Rob Horstman has called for a thorough investigation.
“My take on this really is the Universal Service Obligation needs to be strengthened,” he said.
“I think that obviously the state government has a role, as they have done with many other issues in recent times, to put pressure on their federal government colleagues to ensure this happens.
“I mean that to me is that’s an untenable situation, which has resulted in three people tragically losing their lives across South Australia and WA, of course.”
A spokesperson for St John WA said they were not made aware of any issues involving Optus customers’ inability to contact Triple Zero, and had no briefing from Optus about any outage issues in recent days.
A WA Police spokesperson released a statement on Friday stating that they were in the process of conducting a number of welfare checks following the triple zero outage.
They said it was protocol for carriers to contact police when an outage has disrupted a triple zero call.
Optus chief executive Stephen Rue said there would be a thorough investigation, but would not say for how long calls to the emergency number failed to go through.
