Triple Zero services need a new overseer

September 22, 2026 — 6:25pm

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Australians presumed police, firefighters and ambulances were just a phone call away, never doubting the reliability of the Triple Zero emergency service for 65 years.

But repeated high-tech crashes have suddenly alerted Australians to their vulnerability in the face of the telco sector’s failures to live up to their duty as the cornerstone of public safety.

More than 450 Optus calls to emergency services failed last September as the network went down for 13 hours. Two deaths were linked to the outage. Then last July, Telstra failed twice, and the outages rippled across the nation, interrupting the daily lives of millions, and hundreds of calls to Triple Zero failed to connect.

A cross-party........

© The Sydney Morning Herald