Exclusive: Liddle calls out Labor ‘pile on’ over Telstra outage post

In her only interview over a controversial post linking the Telstra outage to a woman’s death, Senator Kerrynne Liddle is not holding back.  Mike Smithson discusses the government singling her out for criticism “rather than turning the screws on Telstra”.

Telstra’s catastrophic system failure early last Wednesday morning has sent a series of shudders through that company and plunged an SA family into the despair of a lost loved one while dealing with unwanted attention.

A woman died in hospital amid initial claims her partner was unable to connect to triple zero during the national outage.

That assertion from SA Liberal Senator Kerrynne Liddle now has been ruled out as a factor in her death, but claims, counterclaims and accusations were still flying long after the telco reconnected with its customers.

Liddle was immediately drawn into a web of criticism from the state Labor government that she had not acted appropriately or responsibly.

That followed the federal senator’s Facebook post on the outage day where Liddle revealed that she had received a report of a tragic death following an “apparent failure to connect to Triple Zero.”

Liddle says she did not inform police of the information herself out of respect for the family but she had urged them to do so.

Liddle and her staff were under siege from media for almost two days wanting a ‘please explain’ after a political fuse over the incident was ignited by the Acting Premier and then the Police Minister just hours apart.

Until Friday the senator, who’s on annual leave, had only put out a few written lines of a media statement defending herself, but she then took it further.

She was left with little choice but to apologise after Police Commissioner Grant Stevens unravelled a mess of conflicting claims but........

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