00:00 The Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, made the announcement earlier today saying
00:05 that her department will be looking at what went wrong and what led to this massive outage
00:10 yesterday, forcing many millions of Australians offline for the better part of the day.
00:16 The exact terms of reference are still being worked on, those details to be released in
00:20 the near future.
00:22 But Michelle Rowland says it is critical that Optus and the industry as a whole look at
00:26 what went wrong to avoid such outages in the future, given, as she says, no network is
00:32 immune from such technical outages.
00:35 This complements the inquiry that has already been launched by the Australian Communication
00:40 and Media Authority, which is specifically looking at whether or not Optus mobile phones
00:45 were able to make emergency calls during the network outage, effectively piggybacking off
00:50 of other networks to do so.
00:52 There are rules requiring Optus phones, or any phones for that matter, to do that in
00:57 the event that their home network has been disabled.
01:02 Michelle Rowland saying that she has heard in some examples that did indeed work, but
01:06 she wants to make sure and wants the ACMA to look into whether or not that was the situation
01:13 across the board.
01:15 Just before midday here in Canberra, the Senate also passed a motion launching a third investigation,
01:21 a parliamentary inquiry, into this situation.
01:26 This was moved by the Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who is the party's communications
01:31 spokesperson.
01:32 She says that it is vital that Optus customers get answers from the executives of the telco,
01:39 and that this inquiry will have the powers to compel witnesses, including the chief executive.
01:47 This is going to be an important inquiry because we will force the Optus CEO and the executives
01:58 of the giant telco to front up and explain what's happened, and what they are going to
02:04 do to consider the losses, the impact that this has had on millions of Australians, and
02:12 what they're going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again.
02:15 The Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has said that customers have an expectation
02:19 that they will be looked after as a result of the inconvenience they experienced yesterday
02:25 during that outage.
02:26 She hasn't specifically gone to what sort of compensation should be offered, but noted
02:31 that many Optus business customers - we know that there are hundreds of thousands of those
02:35 - did struggle to do business yesterday as a result of this network outage.
02:40 She's not the only member of the government to make such comments, effectively criticising
02:45 Optus for not committing to that so far.
02:48 Michelle Rowland also critical of the telco for what she has described as a lack of information
02:54 and communication with its customers, not taking to the airwaves of TV and radio networks
03:00 to explain to their customers what the outage meant for them and when services would be
03:04 restored until many hours into the incident.
03:08 But on the issue of compensation, Michelle Rowland says Australian customers have an
03:12 expectation that they will be looked after and will be offered something in response
03:19 to the inconvenience that they've experienced.
03:23 If they are done wrong, if there is an outage of this nature that causes them to suffer
03:30 loss in some way, be that economic or otherwise, that corporations will do the right thing
03:35 by them.
03:36 And certainly I urge that in every case from Corporate Australia, including this one.
03:41 I think that there is a reasonable expectation here.
03:45 That's Michelle Rowland speaking to the ABC earlier this morning.
03:48 For its part, Optus has not committed to compensation.
03:51 Kelly Beyer-Rosmarin, the telco's chief executive, has made comments along the lines that Optus
03:56 customers should be rewarded for their patience.
03:59 But on the issue of compensation, it seems like that is not on the telco's agenda at
04:03 this stage.
04:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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