Optus has promised its staff will be held accountable for September’s Triple Zero outage – but only after “the dust settles” on current investigations. Three deaths have been linked to the outage.

On Monday, the first day of hearings for a Senate inquiry into the incident, inquiry chair and Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young bluntly asked “who’s going to get the sack?” from inside Optus’ executive team.

Optus chairman John Arthur replied:

If you’re asking me whether or not there will be accountabilities here, and accountabilities not just for junior people, then I can assure you that there will be, when the dust settles.

Yet even if that happens, how much will Australians know about any future exit payouts for Optus executives? Probably less than Optus customers would like, thanks to it being a foreign-owned company.

When major corporate failures occur, Australians expect meaningful accountability – including on executive pay.

Modern executive pay extends far beyond salaries. Think of it as a financial layer cake. Base salary is often just the bottom layer.

On........

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