Mark Riley: The Triple-0 system is supposed to have a foolproof backup system. How does this keep happening?

For a major communications company it is strange that Optus doesn’t communicate very well.

Indeed, it does it poorly.

And when it does communicate it sometimes does it to the wrong place.

We learnt that this week in the wake of the telco’s latest triple-0 outage, which is linked to up to four deaths in South Australia and WA.

When the outage was identified on the afternoon of Thursday, September 18, Optus sent an email to the communications department as it was required to do under law.

But it sent it to the wrong email address, one that had been decommissioned for such notifications and was only being monitored irregularly by the department.

That wasn’t the only problem with that email, though.

It had been copied to the correct address of a member of Communications Minister Anika Wells’ staff. That person did receive it.

But its contents, Wells told the Parliament on Wednesday, were “clearly incorrect, inaccurate and misleading”.

That first email was followed by another seven minutes later assuring the minister’s office — and the wrong departmental address — that the issue had been resolved and had only affected 10 triple-0 calls.

Optus also said it was conducting welfare checks on all those affected customers.

Wells says her staffer called Optus to follow up the email and was assured “the outage was only minor and, most importantly, there were no adverse impacts on any person”.

Both those reassurances were wrong. Badly wrong.

The following day, Optus conceded the outage had affected 600 triple-0 calls and that three and possibly four customers had subsequently died.

Liberal senators and the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young turned their blowtorches onto departmental officials in Senate estimates this week and the Coalition pounded Wells in question time, trying to uncover exactly who knew what when and what they did about it.

That is how accountability works.

But beneath the political argy-bargy and public condemnation of Optus, there is a more important and fundamental question to be answered.

Just what is going on with Australia’s emergency triple-0 system? And why is such a critical, indeed vital service failing so regularly with apparently fatal consequences? Particularly at Optus.

This is the third major outage at Optus in recent times. The first was caused by a network upgrade via its parent company Singtel, which knocked out triple-0 connections nationwide. The second was put down to problems with a mobile tower in the NSW Illawarra. The cause of this latest one is yet to be identified.

But triple-0 is supposed to have a failsafe back-up system known as “camping on”, where customers’ failed emergency calls are automatically redirected through another network’s system.

That back-up apparently failed in all three cases.

And Australian mobile users — which is almost all of us — deserve to know why.

The Albanese Government’s inquiry into the 2023 nationwide Optus outage, known as the Bean Review, recommended a “triple-0 custodian” be established to continuously monitor the system and take control of any outage.

Wells says that custodian was put in place in her department in March, though for some reason the legislation establishing its powers were only rushed into the Parliament on Tuesday after this latest triple-0 crisis.

Shadow communications minister Melissa McIntosh questioned the effectiveness of the custodian this week, suggesting whatever it did was obviously not enough to prevent Optus stuffing up yet again.

Wells has protected herself and the Government effectively under intense scrutiny in question time thus far, laying the primary blame at the feet of Optus.

That is reasonable.

But the larger questions about the Government’s administration of the triple-0 system still need to be answered.

And those answers may soon come.

Sarah Hanson-Young says the Greens will move for a Senate inquiry when the chamber next sits on October 27.

Coalition sources tell me they are likely to support that.

Together, the Greens and Coalition numbers outweigh the Government in the Senate. That should mean that the inquiry happens.

And when it does, Optus and the Government will be forced to communicate clearly in the hope the potentially fatal flaws in our emergency call system are identified and fixed.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor