Transcript - ABC Radio Sydney - 19 November 2025

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

19 November 2025

Transcript 

ABC Radio Sydney Breakfast with Craig Reucassel

Topics: Triple Zero; Samsung; TPG Telecom; net zero; coal.

E&EO … 

Craig Reucasel

The Shadow Minister for Communications and the Federal Member for Lindsay is Melissa McIntosh who joins us now. Morning, Melissa.

Melissa McIntosh

Good morning.

Reucassel

What do you make of this situation? This is quite concerning.

McIntosh

Yeah, it's really devastating and I would - you know, be very reasonable for all of your listeners to be concerned about it. I've been warning for some time now - it's pretty much two months to the day where we had that terrible outage, the Optus outage, where sadly people lost their lives. And since that time, I've been saying we need to be doing everything we can to ensure it doesn't happen again. And the government should be putting every lever pulling every lever pushing on the telcos to make sure that they're up to scratch. And this time the Samsung devices are related to the 3G shutdown which was over a year ago. And it was like missing information for a whole year. It was only just disclosed about a month ago that these devices would not be compatible and people have only a month to change over. So, you either change over your device or you download software. But a lot of people don't know this is coming. That’s the problem.

Reucassel

Yeah, absolutely.

McIntosh

They either receive a text message or an email and particularly with older Australians. And I know this with having older parents, like having to download software is something that's not particularly easy. So, it's a big mess right now. And sadly, as you said, another person has passed away.

Reucassel

Yeah, absolutely. It seems like some Samsung phones need to be upgraded - need to actually, you know, you need to get a new one. Some can be - there can be an upgrade done with software. You say this only became known about a month ago. TPG said they have been sending out emails or texts to people to say to upgrade their phones. So this has only been a new thing we've discovered.

McIntosh

Yeah. Even though the 3G shutdown was over a year ago for some reason and again, there's so many mysteries around what's going on right now. That's why I've called for an independent investigation into the whole ecosystem, including the handsets, the networks, because we had those issues with Optus and even the infrastructure because a few weeks ago there was stories around the Triple Zero network going down because of a piece of – you know, somebody vandalised one of the towers, which is just not good enough. So, we haven't known about this. Somebody uncovered this issue and then has given the customers a month to get their act together. So, it's pushing it back onto Australians rather than the telco providers. And I think the Minister for Communications needs to come out strongly and demand that the telcos put in every effort they can to contact people because it seems like sending text messages like what appears to have happened, sadly in this case, is not working.

Reucassel

Does this thing - does there need to be kind of a public education process or adverts or something to actually tell people about this? Because as you say, look, I've got elderly parents too who might be ignoring a text that says upgrade your phone and you may not realise the significance of this.

McIntosh

Yeah, and elderly parents who get told all the time to be careful about scams.

Reucassel

Yes.

McIntosh

So that's the other issue that's coming in is that people are thinking that they're getting a text message that's a scam and they're not, they're just leaving it. So, yes, more needs to be done. The government needs to, you know, even invest itself in some campaigns around letting people know because it's life and death stuff. This isn't just about upgrading your phone for making a call to your mate. This is around the most essential phone service when somebody's in great need.

Reucassel

The other thing about this is it's difficult to necessarily test it. Luke Coleman, the CEO of the Australian Telecommunications Alliance, spoke to 702 Drive last night. He said there's been a spike in people testing their phones. Here's what he said.

Luke Coleman

In one case, I believe last week there were as many as 1,000 test calls in a day. Now, that can potentially clog up the system for people who do have real emergencies and are calling Triple Zero in a life threatening situation. So can I really discourage people from calling 000 to test their phone because there's another issue there that the devices we're talking about may only be unable to reach Triple Zero in certain circumstances. So, it could create a false sense of security. So please do not make a test call. Instead, take the opportunity to update the software on your device.

Yeah, so does there need to be a way that we can test this? As Luke says, the difficulty is people are making these test calls which is clogging the system. But secondly, it's not necessarily like, for instance, with TPG or Vodafone it might be when the Vodafone is going to a different network that you can't make the call. That's not always going to be the case. So how do we actually get people to know that their phone can work?

McIntosh

That's the thing, people are losing confidence in the system and that's why they're testing. And can you blame them? And people try and call their telco provider, and they sit on the phone on hold for an unacceptable amount of time. So, the fact that people are testing means they're really concerned. But I think the best thing people can do is to contact, you know, I'm saying this, I just said that people spend too much time on hold and it's true, their telco provider, because it will come to a stage, middle of December, when those handsets won't be able to be used and you'd hate to have more people over that, you know, Christmas period unable to call Triple Zero. But more needs - as I said, we haven't heard from the Minister for Communications on this except for a written statement. If she could come out on behalf of the government and reassure Australians that everything is, you know, they're doing everything they can to make sure that this essential phone service is working, that would be a great first step.

Reucassel

Yeah, we'll see if we can speak to the Minister on that front. Just quickly, Melissa, while we've got you, you spoke in favour of dropping net zero within the Liberal Party. I was - I must admit, can you clarify something here? It was a little bit unclear and Sussan Ley was on 7.30 earlier on, it seemed to be that the Liberal government would consider using public money to support coal whilst pointing out that nobody actually wanted to build a new coal fired power station and it wouldn't necessarily happen. What's your view of that position?

McIntosh

Yeah, just on my survey, just so your listeners understand, I wanted to go into the party room to represent my community - it was really important. And I put out a survey, it went into every letterbox, emails and social media and I had around 1,600 people reply and 65% were against net zero by 2050 because the power bills are up so high and they're suffering so much. So I walked in there with that, armed with my community's voice and regarding – sorry.

Reucassel

Yeah, so I understand that, but just a bit unclear as to what you know - are you in favour of supporting new coal with government money? Is that the position?

McIntosh

Yes, so regarding coal, our position is to not close down existing coal firepower stations early and ensuring that they provide baseload power, particularly as renewables come on. I - there is no sentiment towards investing in new coal fired power but if the market demands it in the future, or if it's required in the future, there would be a technology agnostic approach to that. But there is, as I believe it and as I understand the opposition leader said there's nothing on the table

Reucassel

There's no interest in it. So it's kind of like a. Kind of like a Clayton Support for coal yeah, I understand. Thank you very much.

McIntosh

Thank you.

Reucassel

Melissa McIntosh, the Shadow Minister for Communications.