Ley Arrives At Impressive Conclusion That The Government Is Personally Responsible For Optus Outage

CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT

This comes as Opposition Leader Sussan Ley continues to grill the Communications Minister Anika Wells over the government’s slow handling of last month’s deadly 000 outage, because Optus is apparently run out of Parliament House.

The Coalition took a break from very public in-fighting this week, and redirected all of their energy towards demanding answers from the the government about why a major telco corporation fucked up the one thing they are meant to be able to do.

“Australians dialling Triple Zero in an emergency cannot wait for you to learn” said Ley.

“Has the minister personally phoned each family to apologise for the Albanese Labor government’s inaction?”

The Federal Government must now answer for why they failed in their personal responsibility to make sure that the embattled Singtel Optus Pty Limited was unable to provide every single one of their 11 million customers with a functioning phone service.

In typical blame-shifting fashion, the Government is trying to offload the shame and embarrassment by pointing the finger directly at Optus instead of admitting that it is their responsibility to make sure major telecommunications companies are delivering their services at all times.

“They can expect to suffer significant consequences as a result” said the Communications Minister.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has also said that Optus’s behaviour was “completely unacceptable” and “action” would be taken.

Furthermore, the Government is now facilitating an unfair pile-on for Optus, and have ordered them to pay another a $100 million penalty for “appalling and predatory” conduct in the telco’s sales practices, that have been found to specifically target vulnerable Australians.

All of this to distract from the very valid point that Sussan Ley has made that our Federal Government has failed in their responsibility to guarantee that every single private and public company that operates in Australia, including both domestic and foreign conglomerates, as well as their subsidaries, are doing their jobs at all times.

It is not known what government minister personally pressed the ‘Stop Optus For No Reason’ button, but Ley has said they should be the ones paying tens of millions of dollars – not the poor company that was left to operate unsupervised by our government.