2CC with Stephen Cenatiempo - 13 January 2026

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

13 January 2026

Transcript

2CC with Stephen Cenatiempo

Topics: Early recall of Parliament; Triple Zero inquiry; Social Media Ban.

E&EO …

Stephen Cenatiempo

All right, we're joined now by the Shadow Communications Minister, Melissa McIntosh. Melissa, good morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Good morning. Happy New Year to your listeners.

Stephen Cenatiempo

And to you too. There's quite a bit to talk about this morning. Obviously, the first thing is Parliament's been recalled early, so you were scheduled to come back to Canberra on the 3rd of February, you'll now come back on the 19th of January. This legislation, look, I've got no problem with tightening gun laws, I think we need to do that on a regular basis. But this seems to be an exercise in rushing through legislation to make it appear like something's happening rather than actually doing anything, because you can pass all the laws you like, but if you don't enforce them, what difference do they make?

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, you are right. And we've been calling on the government to bring back Parliament for some time now and we are concerned about the makeup of the legislation. It is really important. There needs to be change in this country, so to have legislation just for legislation's sake is just not going to work. The Coalition finally received the legislation late yesterday and it's including the explanatory memorandum; there's over 500 pages. So that's a lot to get through in fine detail between now and next week, and it is concerning where you're lumping some really complex issues with other issues. So, we were hoping that the legislation would be broken into separate bills to get it right, because gun laws are not the same as free speech or other issues that are going on. So, let's see, we don't have much detail right now, that's what it comes down to.

Stephen Cenatiempo

But isn't this a reason, you know, and when the Coalition first started to call for Parliament to be recalled earlier, well, hang on, why? Why not come back on the 3rd of February and use the time in between to actually examine and develop the proper legislation, because if it's passed on the 19th of January or the 3rd of February, it's not going to make any difference.

Melissa McIntosh

Well, I think when we first did it, there was that sense of urgency, but now we're a couple of weeks out, you know, the preference, it's all politics, really. If you're going to get down to it, the Prime Minister wants to show that he's doing something faster than what he was going to do. It’s the same way that he called the Royal Commission, he was saying, I did this at lightning speed, but the reality was Australians of every kind, from sports people to businesspeople, to everyday Australians were calling on him to do so. So, it's the politics of bringing back early now when you've only got a couple of weeks to go.

Stephen Cenatiempo

It's quite extraordinary, isn't it, where you say we don't need this thing and we won't do it, and then all of a sudden, I'm doing it at lightning speed, nobody's ever done it this quickly before. I don't know how those two statements actually fit together, but I want to talk about some areas of your portfolio. You and I have spoken a number of times throughout the course of the last 12 months about the problems with our triple zero system. Now that we're in the middle of natural disaster season and we've got fires raging through Victoria, we've got cyclones in North Queensland and potentially fires in other parts of the country, our Triple O system is more important now than ever. Do we have any resolution on whether or not this thing is fit for purpose?

Melissa McIntosh

I've been warning, as we said, speaking to you about this for months and months and the concerns around whether the system would hold out during a disaster. Well, I just read an article today that the whole system went down during the fires and nothing was in place and fireies were having to run up the road and communicate verbally with each other. That's just not good enough. And that's why we need this thorough, independent investigation. You should still be able to make those calls and should be able to camp onto another network but it's not happening and that's why this is so important. And again, I feel the government completely downplayed the Triple Zero outages. We received the inquiry from Optus itself just before Christmas, so what a great time to hide what you don't want the public to know about. So, we'll continue to scrutinize that, but we're still waiting on the government's own apparent inquiry, which is not independent, but things need to be done. We're in disaster season, we've had those floods, we've had fires, and we're hearing people couldn't call when they needed it most and that's what it's all about.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Absolutely extraordinary. Now, the other thing is, we're about a month into the social media band for under 16’s. Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, says it's deactivated over half a million accounts. What's your take on the progress so far?

Melissa McIntosh

I think that's a little bit at odds with what people are actually saying on the street and I'd like to know the breakdown of those accounts, whether they are truly young people or if it's a cleanup of other accounts. But they're saying they've taken, you know that demo that just shows the size of how many people are on social media and does that scrape the surface of what's really going on? We know kids are going onto the Prime Minister's own social media and having a bit of a laugh, saying, “I'm still here, PM, you haven't, you haven't got us off.” So, every anecdote I'm hearing is that kids are still on social media. We want to protect Australian children, but we knew that this was a high risk of failure and I'm yet to see that there's any success beyond what the Prime Minister said would be. Success is a national conversation.

Stephen Cenatiempo

And we've also got High Court challenges to go yet too. So, this legislation might not actually stand up.

Melissa McIntosh

Well, that's right, thanks for reminding people about that. There are challenges and I imagine there'll be more challenges in the future. So, you've got that going on and you've also got Meta. I read in the article raising the fact that kids are still roaming around on other platforms in a logged-out state and not getting protection. So, I think there is a lot more to go on this issue. But we don't have the digital duty of care that the government's been sitting on for a long time, which was meant to protect kids. So, what's going to happen there? How are you going to protect these children that are still on social media? Clearly on social media, despite what the Government's saying otherwise.

Stephen Cenatiempo

A long road to go. Melissa. I appreciate your time, and I look forward to chatting to you throughout the course of the year.

Melissa McIntosh

Thank you. Thanks very much.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Melissa McIntosh, the Shadow Communications Minister.