00:00There are a number of agreed steps going forward basically. The first among them and main one
00:09is that the telecommunications providers have agreed to run a series of stress tests in
00:17coming weeks to put their networks under pressure to see if they are in fact reliable providers
00:25of the triple zero service. This is something that the minister was asked about during question
00:32time this afternoon in Parliament House and she said that that process, that test will
00:38happen before the peak of the disaster season. As for further progress in other areas, they
00:46have agreed to continue to meet and work with each other. During this Canberra Parliament
00:53House meeting where the CEOs of the three telecommunications companies were hauled before the minister under
01:01a series of questions, they were asked to provide detail on what steps they have undertaken to
01:07ensure that callers using their networks can access triple zero when and if they need to
01:14do so. So a continuation in terms of what we've been hearing from the government as well, saying
01:20that they are urging these providers to do all they can to ensure the networks are reliable.
01:26And so the minister came under pressure in Parliament today. Take us through what happened there.
01:31That was and this was not unexpected. We did see some previewing or hints that this would be the case.
01:37The opposition leading the way here with a series of questions, some also from the crossbench,
01:43but the opposition seeking to put some of the blame on the minister as well, not allowing her to
01:51completely lay blame solely at the foot of Optus. Now, they said that she needed to answer a series
02:00of questions about when she first became aware of the outage and the steps that followed from there.
02:05Also, she was questioned over whether she had contacted the family members of the multiple
02:13deaths that were related, multiple people who died in the first of the recent outages related to Optus.
02:21She said she had not and that that was something for Optus to do. Then she was questioned again,
02:27further into question time, over why it has taken so long to implement reforms. Some of these reforms put
02:34forward 18 months ago in response to a or as part of a review in to the initial outage of Optus
02:43triple triple zero calls that happened some years ago. 13 of those recommendations have been
02:49implemented after 18 months. There's still five that need to be. And here is the minister talking
02:55about that. In each of those four recommendations, they are either being led or depend on industry.
03:01So at my meeting with the chief executives of the three telcos who I summons to Canberra earlier today,
03:08ahead of introducing the triple zero custodian legislation, I urged industry to go faster on those remaining
03:15four recommendations that they have carriage of. And I'm pleased to update the house, Mr Speaker, that they agreed to do so.
03:22You can hear there some of the flavour of question time with interjections throughout that response
03:29from the minister, her committing to continue to push for the providers to take steps swiftly to resolve
03:37issues over concerns about the reliability of the network as we get ever closer to the peak disaster season.
03:44Jo.
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