Telstra not to be trusted with Triple Zero, says Senate inquiry

Telstra should be stripped of its responsibility for overseeing Australia’s emergency services hotline and the responsibility handed to an independent authority, a cross-party inquiry into the Triple Zero system has recommended, following a series of catastrophic outages over the past year.

The report was handed down on Monday – just over a year after an Optus outage on September 18, 2025 that was linked to two deaths, and a national Telstra outage in July this year.

Signed by Labor, Coalition and Greens MPs, it also calls for a text-based method of contacting Triple Zero and the mandating of domestic roaming for calls and messaging.

“Telstra, Optus and TPG have all let down their customers and the Australian public. With the litany of outages, we have seen millions of Australians affected. Something needs to change,” inquiry chair Sarah Hanson-Young said.

“Our telecommunications laws are out of date, successive governments have failed to ensure that regulation keeps pace with technology. Having access to a mobile phone and the internet is an essential part of everyday life for most Australians and our laws must treat it that way,” the Greens communications spokeswoman said.

The inquiry was established after the Optus outage, which was triggered when a bungled firewall upgrade blocked calls to Triple Zero across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Far West NSW for about 13 hours.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority sued the telecommunications provider in July, alleging Optus failed to connect emergency calls on 1005 occasions, exposing it to penalties of more than $500 million.

The report recommends that Telstra be stripped of its responsibility as the “Emergency Call Person” – the overseer of Triple Zero calls – and that this responsibility be handed to a new statutory authority.

Hanson-Young described this as a “nationalisation” of the oversight mechanism, and demanded it be brought about as a matter of extreme urgency.

The first of 11 recommendations in the report demands a modernisation of the Telecommunications Act 1997, but notes the task would be significant and suggests it should be established in coming years.

Further recommendations call for a review into how welfare checks are performed after Australians are unable to contact Triple Zero due to an outage, a set of minimum reliability standards for the network to be rolled out, and that the communications authority be independently reviewed.

Labor senators on the committee opposed an independent review of the communications authority and mandates for domestic mobile roaming.