Ask someone chosen at random if they think Triple Zero is a government service, and they’d almost certainly say they do. Only those who have had reason to think about it would probably know that it’s private, provided by the suite of telecommunication companies we use every day. I note this for two reasons. First, it says much about how thoroughly we’ve handed things over to the private sector. And second, that despite this, we still feel in our bones that some things are so essential that we assume government is in charge.

This brings me to the theatrical lashing of Optus in a Senate inquiry this week into September’s Triple Zero outage. To call this theatre is not to say it doesn’t matter, or yields nothing important. It does. We now have a fuller picture of Optus’ failures, its slowness to communicate those failures to the federal government, and how those failures might have cost lives. The pressure now being heaped on Optus is deserved; the increasingly common calls for the government to terminate Optus’ government contracts, or even its telecommunications licence, are entirely understandable.

Can Australians still trust the three digits they’ve been taught to dial since childhood?Credit: Marija Ercegovac

Rather, I call it theatre because the spectacle focuses attention on a key protagonist as though this is a drama about a villain or bad actor. But precious little in politics actually boils down to that. Failure, incompetence, even negligence typically occurs in a context that makes it likely. And that context – the rules, the systems of accountability, the regulation or lack of it – is where government fails or........

© WA Today