Transcript - FiveAA Breakfast - 3 November 2025

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

3 November 2025 

Transcript 

FiveAA Breakfast with David Penberthy

Topics: Optus inquiry; Triple Zero Custodian; ACMA; Newspoll; the Coalition.

E&EO … 

David Penberthy

So, can you give us a bit of an idea - the composition of the committee, is it, what, Labor, Liberal, Green, Teal? How does it sort of line up and what do you expect to come out of it?

Melissa McIntosh

Yeah, it's been a combination of, you might be surprised in your listeners of the Coalition with the Greens coming to an agreement to do this inquiry. We've been pressuring the government for weeks and weeks now to have an investigation into what happened with the Triple Zero outage. And this is really the first chance for Australians to really hear from and for us to get to the bottom of that outage and what occurred that day.

The CEO of Optus will be appearing. Optus is up first, and I've got questions. When I met with the CEO, he didn't give me confidence that this wouldn't happen again. Australians deserve confidence in the Triple Zero network. It was – it seemed to be human error. But how does human error of an individual cause such a catastrophic outage when lives were lost?

And questions around - how does a big telco get government contracts at the same time as getting these fines? There's so much into this that is much deeper than just this one outage, this one event, and I hope we get some of those questions answered. In addition, ACMA, the regulator, will be appearing. I said all along, ACMA has been caught up in the fail process. They knew about this outage on the Thursday that it occurred. The Minister didn't know about it, she says, until the Friday what went on there. Now ACMA has been appointed to investigate itself. Basically, it's just – it seems nuts in some ways. I don't think Australians would think this is the right way to be going about things.

So, I think today is a good start for us to get some of those big questions answered.

Penberthy

The government has been quite keen to - and the strength of their language about Stephen Rue's performance, about the company's performance, about its parent company's performance, it seems to have suited the government politically to pile as much public pressure on Optus as possible. To a point justified, because this has happened before. But beyond that, though, the role of government, the role of the regulator - do you think that the government has been deliberately piling it on with Optus to try to create a sense in the public's mind that there's no role for government in any of this?

McIntosh

Yeah, the current Labor government's pretty good at this distraction and people, you know, won't, you know, get to the depths of actually what's going on. There's a lot of lack of transparency, I suppose. The government has a big role. The telecommunications industry is one of the most regulated in the country. Questions around whether those regulations even work.

The government sat on the Bean Review after the first office outage in 2023 for a year and a half. There's still questions around which recommendations they've picked up and have implemented. We found out recently that the Custodian to oversee the whole telecommunications network has been sitting in the Department since March. And, well, what were they doing when this outage happened and what was the Minister instructing them to do?

And then we had to rush through legislation. I really wanted there to be a public register of outages, but the Minister's pushed that back onto the telco. So, it's up to a telco to promote whether it's had an outage or not. And I really, on behalf of the Coalition, push for fines to be increased because the fines are obviously not even making a dent right now in the actions of these big telco providers.

So you're right, there is a big role of government here. There’s – you know, it's quite convenient for them to be pushing it all onto Optus. But it's not just about Optus and it's not just about this one event, it's about the whole telecommunications ecosystem. I think we need a thorough investigation so Australians have confidence again.

Penberthy

And Melissa McIntosh, as Shadow Minister for Communications and a member of the Coalition, I'm not trying to be flippant here, but can I ask you like, good on you for springing out of bed on a wintry Canberra Morning 10 past 6, and doing interviews with us here in SA. But when you look at today's front page of The Aus and the historic low result that the coalition has got, do you worry that people might be in

your crew might be feeling a bit listless and despondent and what's the point? And that they're, you know, the level of enthusiasm and the thoughtful comments you've made in the last six minutes of our chat about a policy area that the Libs might actually be suffering a bit of an existential crisis that they might not emerge from right now.

McIntosh

I've considered that term over the last few months, the existential crisis, and I don't - I've said that we're not in that state, but I do think we're going to be better when we focus on being a strong Opposition. And that's what I've tried to do these last weeks, along with my National Party colleague, Anne Webster. And I think we've done well in prosecuting the case, but we need to do that over and over again and we are down in the dumps.

Australia gave us a big resounding ‘no’ at the last election. So it's not - I don't think it's unexpected that we are so low, but I would like to see us starting to pick up ground again and to start earning the trust, because there's so many issues that we can be prosecuting against the government.

They promised more housing in this country. The targets are way off. They're not going to produce the housing they promised Australia. They promised to get to net zero, but it looks like even a 2030 target they're not going to meet. And there's putting more pressure on more renewables, which is like pushing prices up. And they promised prices, electricity prices would come down for Australians. For me, that's three strikes. They should be out, but as you said, we're talking about ourselves instead. So I hope we turn things around in the very near future.

Penberthy

Yeah, get a few of your colleagues out giving good interviews about policy like you just did. Melissa McIntosh, the Shadow Minister for Communications, thanks for joining us.