Government must act now to take back control of vital public safety service or risk losing more lives

This opinion piece was written by Carol Bennett for the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and other News Corporation papers. Read at the original link.

It is a situation that defies belief. In just 10 days, Optus has presided over two triple-0 outages, including the failure on September 18, that saw more than 600 emergency calls go unanswered and contributed to the deaths of at least three people.

Any such loss of life is tragic. But to know that these events were preventable is simply damning. Australians deserve certainty that when they dial triple-0, they will reach the help they need.

It only took a week. This weekend, yet another outage in the Illawarra has restricted access to emergency services. Public faith in the triple-0 system and the telcos that run it is reaching a crisis point.

As the Chief Executive of the national communications consumer peak body, I am not surprised by recent events. Our communications laws still fail to treat telco services, including triple-0, as the essential public safety infrastructure that they are. Instead, reliability is left to industry “best endeavours.”

The result is a system that repeatedly fails, causing immense harm and eroding confidence in the emergency services Australians must be able to rely on.

Enough is enough. We don’t need longwinded reviews; we need urgent reform. The Government can do three things.

First, the Communications Minister must impose a licence condition on Optus requiring independent technical oversight of their triple-0 systems and processes. Optus has shown it cannot be trusted to carry out this vital safety function without strict supervision. If they don’t comply, they lose their licence to operate as a telco in the country.

Second, parliament must fast-track the triple-0 custodian framework and the other delayed recommendations of the 2023 Bean Review.

Almost two years on, around one-third of those reforms remain unimplemented. It’s time to finish the job.

Finally, it is time to modernise the Telecommunications Act to drive the change in industry culture that we need to see. An initial step would be to replace the industry-drafted Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code with binding, enforceable rules.

This Code is failing communities, and reflects a revenue-first, customers-later approach by telcos which has led to exploitative sales practices and repeated controversies.

triple-0 is too important to be managed at the discretion of executives rewarded for profits, not public safety. Australians need confidence that when the worst happens, their call will always go through. We can only hope that Optus boss Stephen Rue, who now really has his work cut out for him, is realising this.

We must act now. Without urgent change, we risk more lives, more devastation, and further erosion of trust in a system that should protect us all.