Transcript - 2CC Breakfast - 17 October 2025

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

17 October 2025

Transcript

2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo

Topics: Optus meeting; Triple Zero network; Triple Zero outage; social media age minimum. 

E&OE …

Stephen Cenatiempo

Melissa, good morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Good morning.

Cenatiempo

So, you met with the Optus CEO. Did you get the answers you were looking for?

McIntosh

For the sake of all Australians to have confidence again in our Triple Zero network, I wish I did get answers that I was satisfied with, but I haven't. At least I had the meeting. It took weeks and weeks, as you just said, but I had questions around ensuring that this isn't going to happen again, particularly with disaster season bushfires coming up.

And the answer that he gave was not satisfactory to me. He couldn't give me the confidence that I think Australians deserve. And I still have questions around how can human error on something so important result in a disaster of this kind? You know, processes obviously have to be fixed, but you don't expect that would happen in a big company like Optus that one person can get something wrong and the whole Triple Zero network goes out for hundreds of people.

So, no, not a great meeting, but we did have those discussions, and I think the investigations that will take place will uncover more of what went on, including the government's role. I still have questions around when the government knew. I think they knew a lot sooner than they're saying.

Cenatiempo

Well, the thing that concerned me about, and this was revealed in Estimates, is that there was an email sent by Optus to the Ministry to inform them of the problem, but it was old. It went to an old email address that we don't check anymore. I mean, why do we have email addresses that don't get checked?

McIntosh

That's right, we don't check that email. Sorry, that doesn't make sense. I'm sure your listeners would think that's just ridiculous. The other thing is one of those email addresses they weren't checking, but there were three other email addresses. One was the Minister's office herself, so someone had to be checking that. That's her staff. And the other was ACMA, the regulator. So, they've been caught up in this whole mess and now they're the investigator as well. So, I've been saying you can't be the investigator of this horrible issue if you were part of the failed process. The Minister said that she didn't find out until the Friday and the email that you're talking about went out on Thursday. So how can there be a whole day of email chains? And I'm sure I've just sent more than just one email and nobody knew about it. That's not right.

Cenatiempo

Well, I think the focus seemed to be on this failed social media ban that's coming in on the 10th of December. That seems to be everything that Anika Wells is interested in at the moment rather than something that actually literally cost people lives.

McIntosh

That's right, she did a press conference or two and then shot off to New York while this crisis was unravelling. You know that's not right. You don't leave your post when people have died. Regardless of how important you think another issue is, your citizens should be your top priority. And you're right, I think there's a lot of questions around the social media ban and whether it's going to work. We want to protect our kids, but we're already seeing that we don't know which platforms are in or out.

The government's only just put in a campaign to alert people, but the campaign's pretty weak. I'm hearing schools aren't ready. It's going to happen in school holidays when kids are at home and their parents meant to deal with it.

And I just don't think the technology is proving that it's going to be up to it.

Cenatiempo

No.

McIntosh

Particularly given the platforms wanting to.

Cenatiempo

Well, the experts are already saying kids are already finding ways around it. Melissa, great to talk to you. We'll catch up again soon.

McIntosh

You, too. Thank you.