2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo - 8 December 2025

Melissa McIntosh MP
Shadow Minister for Communications
Shadow Minister for Women
Federal Member for Lindsay

Monday, 8 December 2025

Transcript

2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo

Topics: Triple Zero inquiry; Social Media ban; Communications Minister Anika Wells’ travel expenses; Older Samsung devices not connecting to Triple Zero; Off-shore data centres and powering data centres in Australia; Kids migrating tonew social media platforms.

E&EO …

Stephen Cenatiempo

Whilst Parliament has wrapped up for year, there's still a bit happening this week, including tomorrow. A public hearing into the Triple Zero service outages and then of course, on Wednesday, the social media ban for under 16 comes in. To talk about both of these issues is the Shadow Communications Minister, Melissa McIntosh. Melissa, good morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Good morning.

Stephen Cenatiempo

I suppose before we get into these two issues, your counterpart seems to be in all sorts of drama over her predilection for travel.

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt when her kids, you know she's a mum as well, but now seeing her husband has gone off to the F1 and the cricket, I've probably lost any support for her on these ones. It's relentless. Every day we're hearing more and more, and I didn't think she should have left the country during the Triple Zero crisis and to hear she went, and it cost us $100,000 in flights and another $70,000 in an event that's just not on. That doesn't meet Australians expectations of a Minister.

Stephen Cenatiempo

The answer from both the Minister and the Prime Minister is that it's all within the guidelines. Do we need to have a long, hard look at these guidelines?

Melissa McIntosh

I think it would be time. Sometimes the guidelines, you know, even for me as an MP and for staff, just the clarification on things can be complex and I think it is about time because people are getting caught up and the media have an intense interest in this and the public does too. So, yes, I believe it is. Tighten them up or ensure that it's not, the pub test isn't the main test. If it's not right, then it shouldn't be done. So, with the Minister, you can't just say this in the guidelines when your husband's going with you to the cricket and to the F1. That's, you know, for anyone you’d think, that's not really what it's meant to be about.

Stephen Cenatiempo

No, absolutely. Now let's talk about more important issues, the public hearing into the Triple Zero service outages. Now, there are several outages, obviously we had that big one that most of us are still focused on, but there's been several other incidents since then. This kicks off tomorrow, who's going to be called before this inquiry? Because a lot of the fingers have been pointed at, particularly at Optus, but this is a broader problem than just them.

Melissa McIntosh

My interest for tomorrow is going to be on the Samsung issue and the 3G, the failed 3G rollout. I'm really concerned that there's thousands of Australians right now who think their phone's working because it works okay, it's on 4G for normal phone calls, but the way the phones were set up, when you need to make a triple zero phone call, your phone automatically tries to go to 3G and that's why it can't connect, and people just don't know. They might have received this notification, a message or an email, but as we know, a lot of people are very wary of scam text messages, so they may not have followed the advice to either get a new phone or to download the software. So I pretty much made a public announcement a couple of weeks ago because the Minister for Communications hasn't said a thing about it, that please, if you do have one of these phones, do something about it, because that's a huge risk, thousands of people out there not being able to make a triple zero call if they need to. So, I'm really interested tomorrow in hearing from Samsung. I think that'll be a really important piece of the puzzle.

Stephen Cenatiempo

The other issue here is, and I think I've said this to you before, is that now that we no longer have actual landlines anymore we are at the mercy of electronic communication effectively, which is what has been at the crux of a lot of these failures and that's going to continue on. Do you believe we can put enough safeguards in place to make sure that the system will always work?

Melissa McIntosh

I think we need to, we're talking about reviews, I think we need to do a whole review of the regulation. So, the telco industry is one of the most regulated, but that doesn't mean that it's working effectively. So, I think a huge overhaul, an independent inquiry into the whole ecosystem is what I've been calling for, to hear that the custodian, there was a recommendation that the custodian, which is just a fancy word for the person that's overseeing this whole issue now, there was a recommendation to put them in emergency services, not in the Department of Communications and it was the current minister that said, no, I want them in my department. So, there's too much going on here to not do something quite revolutionary, something that really overhauls the system, because we can't just keep accepting that this happens.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Are there other parts of the world that seem to be getting this right that we know of?

Melissa McIntosh

Well, probably. I think it's an issue worldwide, but, you know, other countries are progressing faster than us on satellites in the sky and I think I've spoken to you probably about this as well, my concerns around foreign owned satellites, low orbiting satellites and the sovereign risk of that. We don't have any Australian owned satellites, so if something happens, where are we with that? I think the closest that we're getting is Optus working with the university on developing our own in the near future but, you know, the confidence you have in Optus right now doing anything right it's pretty low.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Question without notice because I know that you've talked a lot about data centres and the fact that most of our data is stored overseas. Now there is a rapid growth in Australian data centres planned over the next decade or so, but we now find that these data centres could need up to 40 million litres of water a day. There's bigger issues here than just the actual data.

Melissa McIntosh

Huge issues that we need to tackle and right now they're drawing power from the local grids, and it's equivalent to around 50,000 homes, so that's huge. So, if we don't think about the power, the water requirement, we're going to lose the ability to have data centres here in this country and I have talked a lot, I think it's really important trust to have data here stored in Australia and that's part of the issue with the social media ban and the requirement of people to produce digital id. Your birth certificate information or your driver's license information will be acquired by a third party provider, not even Meta or the platforms themselves, and then we'll go offshore and we still haven't had an answer from the government or the platforms how long that data will be stored for very, very personal information.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Well, let's talk about that because the social media ban comes into effect on Wednesday. We've already seen Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram start instituting that ban, but do you know, I mean am I as an adult now going to have to upload my ID on Wednesday onto these various platforms? Do we actually know what's happening on Wednesday yet?

Melissa McIntosh

The way that the Minister, and the Prime Minister too, is getting around this, of using very tricky language saying I'm dog whistling on digital ID is because the first effort needs to not be digital ID. So the companies will have some sort of age verification technology like a facial scan or something like that, but the thing they don't say is that in the trials that they had prior to rolling this out, there were really quite high failure rates, up to, I think in the 30% where there's, somebody might not look a certain age - 73% of 15 year olds were the wrong age - so if that fails they will then ask for digital id and the companies have said this to me themselves as we don't want to risk a $50 million fine. If you want to get onto our platform and you're, the age verification doesn't work or misreads your age, then you will have to provide digital id.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Well, I think back to my own childhood when I was, you know, it happened to me once when I tried to buy a movie ticket when I was 16, I looked older than 16 and therefore couldn't get a discounted movie ticket because I didn't have ID to prove that I was under 16 because when you're under 16 you don't have ID. But I mean, this is going to be an issue for a lot of kids, particularly these days kids are looking a lot older than they are.

Melissa McIntosh

And we're hearing that they're doing all sorts of tricky things to get around the age verification, makeup or wrinkles or even using their parents’ faces. So, they're going to be getting around this and they're already migrating across to platforms that aren't including the ban. I don't know why the government hasn't decided to, if they've already got a list of current platforms, why aren't they including the other ones now? Why are they allowing these kids to migrate across to another platform?

Stephen Cenatiempo

Because that has been the concern of a lot of child safety experts suggesting that, you know, it's all well and good to ban Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and these things, but if they're starting to move over to some of the gaming platforms where we know that the grooming and the bullying is intense, or this, none of this covers online pornography, for instance. There seem to be a lot of loopholes and a lot of additional dangers that most experts now think kids will go looking for because they need to get their digital fix, so to speak.

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, the minister saying that kids will now go outside and have a real world life, I think she's being particularly unrealistic about that. They're already showing that they're migrating across concerns obviously around AI and hearing that kids have AI bots as best friends, that's terrible, and talking about the child safety organisations, also the mental health organisations, I read today a prominent psychologist warning that it's going to get worse before it gets better. Has the government invested in mental health, youth mental health organisations, to take on the extra pressure that they're now anticipating? I haven't heard much about that and I don't think they have. So, this is what I'm saying when I'm warning about this ban, that the government did a big PR exercise before it even had success, and we're hearing more and more about potential failures, and that's what I'm concerned about.

Stephen Cenatiempo

They've certainly opened a can of worms. Melissa, great to talk to you this morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Thank you.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Melissa McIntosh, the Shadow Communications Minister.

[Ends]