Transcript - 2CC Breakfast - 8 October 2025

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

8 October 2025

Transcript

2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo

Topics: Triple Zero outage; Triple Zero inquiry.

E&EO …

Stephen Cenatiempo

Joining us now is the Shadow Communications Minister, Melissa McIntosh. Melissa, good morning.

Melissa McIntosh

Good morning.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Yesterday, obviously first day of Parliament, the madhouse back in town for another couple of weeks. The big issue for you, of course, is these Triple O outages. The Communications Minister, Anika Wells, has defended her handling of this. From what I can see, there hasn't been any handling at all.

Melissa McIntosh

Hands off handling if that's the way she wants to work it. The Optus outage happened and she appointed ACMA, the regulator, to investigate what occurred - which included people dying, four people dying, during the outage - and then she chuffed off to New York, came back, called the Optus and Telstra and TPG CEOs to Parliament yesterday - three weeks later - and now is rushing legislation through the House yesterday and today on a recommendation to the government from a year and a half ago. So, I don't think she's pretty across it.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Explain to us what this recommendation is, because we hear about this Triple O guardian, which some reports suggest is already in place, but now I'm hearing the legislation hasn't actually gone through yet. What is the process about protecting the Triple 0 system?

Melissa McIntosh

One of the recommendations when Optus had that outage back in 2023 was to install a guardian which would oversee the whole Triple Zero network and ensure that things were kept up to date, recommendations were implemented, testing was done, all those sorts of things to make sure that the system was robust. We only heard yesterday when the Minister gave her speech in Parliament that this custodian had actually been in place since March this year. So, if it was in place since March this year, what was it doing? What was this person doing in their job and did they not have the power? So obviously they didn't have any powers because now we are having to rush legislation through in the closing weeks of Parliament to give this person, who happens to be the Secretary of the Department of Communications, the powers it needs to do its job.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Because, Melissa, the Minister is suggesting that your criticisms of the government are letting Optus off the hook here and the government's trying to make Optus the bad guy. But when I talk to technology experts, they say that this could have happened to any carrier. I mean, when you're doing an upgrade, human error can happen. But then we had the second outage, a tower outage, and we know that Telstra suffered one of these in Western Australia not that long ago. Are we at the mercy of the fact that we switched over to this NBN system, which means landlines don't exist anymore, and we're at the mercy of these wireless systems that could go down at any time.

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, and NBN has had an outage, a Triple Zero outage as well in its network, which has impacted Triple Zero. So it is across the board, which is my concern, and that's why I was calling for a full independent investigation and into the technology as well. You're right. I spoke to TPG yesterday, the CEO of TPG was the only telco CEO that would meet with me even though they're all here. Optus CEO won't meet with me, wanted to send his government relations manager. But this is, you know, serious stuff and the TPG CEO said technology is changing so fast, but that's not an excuse. This is our Triple Zero network. Every single one of your listeners should be able to pick up the phone and call Triple Zero in their greatest time of need. So, we do need more confidence in the whole Triple Zero network, and I'm concerned about the approach of the government, the hands off approach, and I really hope this legislation isn't just a bureaucratic sort of political play and it actually does make a difference. And that's why I'm going to move some amendments to the legislation today because I don't think it's strong enough.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Now I'm no technology expert and I imagine you're not either, but when I look at this, and I know that there are redundancies supposed to be in place, that if something goes down, Triple 0 will switch to another network automatically and all of the networks are supposed to work together on this, but if the technology fails, the technology fails. So that switching mechanism, I don't understand how it can work. Do we need to redesign this system completely?

Melissa McIntosh

I think we do need to really look into that, it's called camp-on. So you're right, when Optus went down, Telstra or TPG should have picked up the calls and it didn't and I'm not technical either but there was a failure in the process. Whether it was a person's failure or technical failure or both, but that certainly needs to be top of the list. Also, one of the other things I'm calling for is to have a public register so every time there isn't Triple zero outage there's transparency and Australians know what's going on. No one knows that there's an outage until there's a big event like what's happened when people have died. I think Australians need that confidence back.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Because the difficulty here is the last time Optus had that major outage in 2023, the response from their CEO and their senior management was absolutely appalling, they basically went to ground, whereas the new CEO has at least come out and fronted people on this. I know he won't talk to you, but at least he did come out and say, this is what's happened. Unfortunately, that level of transparency doesn't give us the detail of what actually went wrong and how we stop it from happening again.

Melissa McIntosh

I'm not going to let the current CEO off the hook as much as you are right now. He fronted the media once or twice, said ‘I'd be here every day until I need to be’, and we didn't see him again. Then the next we heard from him was being dragged to Parliament. So, I don't think that he's done his job in keeping Australians confident in his network and now every time, it's the talk of the town, and it's not in a good way. So, I think the company needs to do more to restore the faith of its customers and Australians in the whole system.

Stephen Cenatiempo

Melissa, I appreciate your time this morning. Thanks for joining us.

Melissa McIntosh

Thank you.