The government has held talks with executives of Optus and its parent company SingTel discussing the two triple-zero outages in less than two weeks. The Communications Minister Anika Wells says the company has promised to work to restore trust in the emergency call system.
00:00This meeting focused on two Optus outages that occurred within the space of 10 days.
00:09The more recent of the two impacted the New South Wales Illawarra region on Sunday.
00:15That led to nine emergency calls failing.
00:20But the more widespread of the two occurred on September the 18th.
00:25Now, that led to hundreds of or impacted hundreds of triple zero calls across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, as well as parts of New South Wales.
00:38Now, we know there are currently multiple investigations into that September the 18th outage.
00:46One of those is being led by telecommunications regulator ACMA.
00:51And Optus has announced that the other investigation, it's an independent review, being led by Kerry Schott.
00:59Now, today, the communications minister, Annika Wells, met with representatives of Optus, as well as its parent company, Singtel,
01:10where there were conversations around exactly what went wrong.
01:17And Annika Wells said that Optus needs to restore confidence in the triple zero network.
01:26She also said that she's asked Optus to appoint an external accountability.
01:33It's not entirely sure exactly what that means or what that looks like, but here's a little bit more of what she had to say on that.
01:43I have also asked Optus to appoint external accountability to make sure that Australians can take advice, not just from Optus themselves,
01:53but from an independent and external party, that the systems in place in Optus will serve Australians when they need it the most.
02:00This is for Optus to take accountability for. They will take accountability for it.
02:05We will make sure the Australian government holds Optus to account.
02:10The federal government has rejected calls from the opposition for another independent inquiry.
02:18Annika Wells also saying earlier that the government had delivered on recommendations from the Bean review.
02:25Now, that was a review that got underway after a separate Optus outage back in 2023.
02:32However, we do know that there are a number of recommendations from that review that are still yet to be implemented.
02:40And how have Optus and Singtel responded?
02:44Yeah, so we've heard from the head of Singtel, Yoon Kwon Moon, earlier.
02:50He also spoke to media after that meeting with Annika Wells.
02:56He said he described it as a constructive meeting.
02:59He also apologised to anyone who may not have been able to get through to triple zero during that outage on September the 18th.
03:09Now, he was also asked why people weren't able to get through to triple zero during that outage where he said that it was due to a step being missed by someone at Optus and he called it a process issue.
03:26He also addressed calls for Optus CEO Stephen Rue to step aside, where he stopped short of providing full support.
03:37Here's what he had to say earlier.
03:39We brought in Stephen 11 months ago to transform Optus, to really address the issues that we've had since 2022-23.
03:49Now, since that press conference, Optus has released a statement effectively backing in its CEO and saying that it had full confidence in Stephen Rue as well as the management team.
04:07We'll see you again at the next term, where we're at the end of that space for him to look for over again.
04:11Okay, so we do in the last moments of his work.
04:13Do we need the end of the day before the end of the day before the end?
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