Bid to fast-track overdue Triple Zero watchdog laws after deaths

2 hours ago 2

Communications Minister Anika Wells is looking at ways to fast-track laws to empower a Triple Zero watchdog to oversee the nation’s emergency phone number, over a year after the Albanese government agreed or offered in-principal support to the recommendations of a review into Optus’ 2023 nationwide network failure.

Speaking on Monday after an Optus outage cut off access to Triple Zero for 13 hours, during which three people died, Wells said work had started to implement the 18 recommendations of last year’s review, but more action was necessary to see those recommendations “delivered in full”.

“The Bean review was designed to make sure that this never happened again, after it happened last time around … it appears here that on the face of it, there has been ineffective implementation of those recommendations by Optus,” Wells said.

Legislation is being drafted to give the regulator role, which already exists, more teeth to enforce compliance, and will be introduced as soon as it is ready. But the window to introduce the bill this year is shrinking as parliament will only sit for four more weeks before it rises in December.

Last Thursday’s outage resulted in over 600 failed calls to emergency services, while three people died. It was the telco’s second major outage following a 14-hour nationwide failure in November 2023 that limited the ability of customers to contact emergency services, use EFTPOS systems or communicate through the network.

Following the 2023 outage, then-communications minister Michelle Rowland ordered a review led by former Australian Communications and Media Authority chairman Richard Bean. The review’s recommendations included the establishment of a “Triple Zero custodian”, twice yearly testing of the emergency services network by carriers and the mandatory reporting of outages to the Department of Communications or ACMA.

The government agreed to all the recommendations, either in principle or outright, but a third of them have not been introduced almost a year and a half later. During a press conference on Sunday, Optus CEO Stephen Rue could not say which of the report’s recommendations had been implemented by his firm.

Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief Carol Bennett said the Triple Zero custodian laws need to introduced as soon as possible.

Bennett said the custodian would serve as “an extra safety net to ensure that the public is protected from any kind of outage or breach of the rules, whether it be the outage itself or the follow-up response to that”.

“The obligation is on the federal government to fast-track that legislation, but it’s also on the telcos to act on that review, especially when they told us this wouldn’t happen again,” Bennett said.

“It absolutely needs to be a priority to shift the way we treat telcos to an essential service and regulate them the way we do energy, water, banking. They have such an important function, and a particularly important function when it comes to public safety,” she said.

Associate Professor Rob Nicholls, a telecommunications expert at the University of New South Wales said the recommendations were “eminently achievable”.

“The answer was to accept the 18 recommendations at a government level and do the work to make them mandatory. Not too hard, but that step wasn’t taken,” Nicholls said.

Shadow communications spokesperson Melissa McIntosh said the delay in legislating a custodian “simply isn’t good enough”.

“It has been 18 months since the government responded to the Bean review and the establishment of a custodian was a priority recommendation. Questions need to be asked as to why this hasn’t already occurred,” McIntosh said in a statement to this masthead.

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