TRANSCRIPT:
A Senate inquiry has kicked off into Optus's September outage where hundreds of people were not able to call triple 000, and was ultimately linked to three deaths.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed its beginning.
"Ah look.. Optus failed the common sense test of delivering for their customers and the committee inquiry today is an opportunity for those issues to be pursued."
Coalition senator Sarah Henderson, who is on the committee, has condemned Optus for the outage.
However, her sticking point was with the government and the Australian communications and media authority (A-C-M-A), which is yet to testify at the inquiry.
She says there was a six-month delay in implementing rules that compel telcos to advise emergency services and the regulator of an outage in real time.
"The regulator in charge of this matter is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. That is simply not good enough. We know the regulator also made a number of big mistakes including imposing a range of rules to improve the triple 000 service, but waiting 6 months for that to come into effect - they were made in April and they didn’t come into effect until the first of November - they are really important rules like advising the telco carriers to advise emergency services in real time when there is a triple zero outage."
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young has been leading the senate inquiry.
The focus is on the timeline of when Optus CEO Stephen Rue learned deaths were linked to the outage.
Mr Rue has told the inquiry that senior management were informed in an email after midnight, a message that they read the next morning.
The chief executive says he himself learned the news at about 8:15 am on September 19 — 12 hours after Optus was aware.
"And that was not until the following day, and the following day was when we were aware of the events that had unfolded and the information was fast coming to light. But it was fast coming to light as they do in these kind of circumstances unfortunately."
Did Mr Rue call the regulator? No.
Did he call the Communications Minister Annika Wells? No.
He says he called the watchdog chair at 2:30 pm - and he called Minister Wells at 4:00 pm.
Ms Hanson-Young put it to Mr Rue that the delay shows he was more concerned with protecting the company than informing the government of the severity of the failure.
"It took you 6 hours to inform the federal government… you were too busy putting your ducks in order, telling your board what was going on, contacting your executives, making sure your companies ducks were in order. Meanwhile, the federal govt, the regulator, the minister were left in the dark. The information you told them the day before was wrong. You let it sit there, being wrong, deadly wrong."
Mr Rue has argued the delay was to ensure "accuracy," rejecting Ms Hanson's characterisation that he was making sure his corporate ducks were in order.
Mr Rue argued that the delayed communication had minimal public impact as Triple Zero calls were operational beforehand.
"The network issue had been resolved. The triple zero calls were operating and there was, there was no danger to the public in the sense that they weren’t able to make 000 calls…The outage had been informed the day before…accepting the fact that we thought it was fewer missed calls. The judgement I had was that it was best to get the information accurately together and then inform the regulator, the department and minister’s office."
Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson has asked how Optus never detected the outage on its own - and why the telco had not been testing its triple zero calls during a firewall upgrade.
She has also asked why Mr Rue should keep his job.
Optus chairman John Arthur says that Rue was hired to fix these failures and expects him to finish the job.
Mr Rue has stood by his leadership.
"I do believe that another change of leadership would actually set back that plan which would not be good for customers and the telecommunications sector."
The issue of compensation has also arisen during the hearing, and whether or not it has been offered to the families.
Mr Rue has assured the committee that Optus will "do the right thing."
