The paralysis in Australia’s communications portfolio

The Triple-0 failure is a consequence of the decades of public policy that’s been created by political cowardice and an unquestioning faith in free markets.

Federal Minister for Communications, Anika Wells.

The latest telecommunications crisis in Australia – another catastrophic failure of the Triple-0 emergency system – has exposed not just the poor state of the emergency infrastructure but also the ongoing neglect within the communications portfolio. The recent spate of Optus outages during September and October that blocked more than 600 emergency calls and have been linked to three preventable deaths, and this has shaken public confidence in both the private operator and the federal government that’s responsible for overseeing this process.

Optus, owned by Singapore’s SingTel, initially reported that only ten emergency calls were affected but days later, the company was forced to admit the scale of the failure –where Optus then went on to email a report of the outage to a Department of Communications address that didn’t exist. Those messages went nowhere, and the problem went unrecognised for over a day – even an email that was sent to the office of Minister Anika Wells wasn’t read until a day later, so we just have to wonder what is going on, not just within the offices of Optus, but within the communications portfolio as well.