Opposition leader Angus Taylor has defended Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson following her decision to test the triple zero emergency service during a Telstra outage on Wednesday.
Sarah Henderson, who serves as the Opposition’s communications spokesperson, attempted two calls to the emergency services number during widespread disruptions caused by the outage. The incident had thrown the entire country into disarray.
Under Australian law, making false calls to triple zero can lead to a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Henderson’s actions have drawn criticism from the Labor party, labeling the calls as irresponsible.
Australia’s leading telecom provider, Telstra, continued to face connectivity issues into the following day. These problems were exacerbated by a separate incident that made it difficult for some users to reach triple zero.
Although Telstra managed to resolve major issues by mid-morning on Wednesday, residual effects lingered, with several transport networks remaining slow or completely stalled into Thursday.
Early on Thursday morning, the company said overnight work had reduced the separate triple zero error by about 90 per cent. On Thursday afternoon, it said it had “implemented a solution” that had addressed the issue, and customers could feel confident calling triple zero.
‘Doing her job’
Taylor argued on Thursday that Henderson was doing her job as Coalition communications spokesperson and that her actions were not illegal.
“If [Communications Minister Anika Wells] hadn’t been absent for seven hours, Sarah wouldn’t have had to do these things,” Taylor said.
“These actions were not illegal and they were made necessary by complete and utter failure from this minister and that should be the focus of the press, and it should be the focus of the nation.”
The senator insisted she was within her rights to make the test calls on Thursday morning.
“I was simply, as the shadow minister for communications, making those initial calls to work out whether the … system was actually operating,” she told Sydney radio station 2GB.
“I accept the criticism, but what I will say is that I am in a unique position holding this government to account.”
Industry Minister Tim Ayres said making the calls at a time when the emergency phone network was being impacted was reckless.
“I was absolutely shocked by that revelation. I just say to Australians, don’t do what she did,” he told ABC radio.
“It’s utterly irresponsible. I just don’t know why anybody would do that, but I’d certainly say nobody should follow her example.”
Political ‘point scoring’
Telstra’s chief financial officer Michael Ackland said on Thursday that Telstra had completed more than 630 welfare checks during the outage for people who had called triple zero but failed to be connected.
Ackland said 230 had reported via SMS that they did not require a further response, 402 required follow-up calls and 170 of those were passed on to police.
Opposition regional communications spokesperson Anne Webster defended Henderson’s conduct, saying the test calls were necessary.
“She’s the shadow minister, she needs to know whether it works or doesn’t work … I would have thought that it was reasonable,” she told ABC radio on Thursday.
“People want to know. I mean, we’re a curious set of beings, aren’t we?”
Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson described the criticism levelled at Henderson as an attempt at point-scoring.
“This is an absolutely desperate attempt from the government to try and distract from their own failures,” he told Sky News.
“I understand why she did what she did. It’s certainly not an offence, and if the government was serious, they would have to put up or shut up here.”
The communications regulator is opening an investigation into Wednesday’s network outage, which experts have said exposed just how reliant critical infrastructure is on a handful of providers.
It is the third major national outage in less than a year for the $56 billion giant, which powers about 25 million Australian mobile services.