Triple Zero should be taken off Telstra, Senate inquiry says

By Elias Thorne · 2026-09-21

A new authority to replace Telstra

A cross-party Senate inquiry tabled its final report on Monday 21 September 2026, recommending the federal government strip Telstra of its designation as Emergency Call Person and replace it with a purpose-built national Triple Zero authority.^[1] The 11-recommendation report is the sharpest structural rebuke to the current model since the service was first privatised.

Telstra has answered Triple Zero calls since 1961, handling around 11.7 million calls a year, or roughly 32,000 a day.^[2] The inquiry's centrepiece recommendation would end that arrangement, placing emergency call management inside a body whose sole statutory mandate is the integrity of the 000 system.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who chaired the inquiry, said that Triple Zero is an essential service, a matter of life or death, and that the system must be fail safe with strong direct regulation, adding that privatisation has failed to keep Australians safe.^[3]

What the September 2025 outage showed

On 18 September 2025, a network configuration change at Optus caused a 14-hour outage affecting emergency calls across South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and far west New South Wales; of 605 Triple Zero call attempts during that period, only 150 connected.^[4] The 75 per cent failure rate, and its link to two deaths, drove the Senate referral seven weeks later.

The inquiry was referred to the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee on 28 October 2025, with an original reporting deadline of 11 February 2026, later extended to 21 September 2026.^[1] Greens, Coalition and Labor senators all signed the final report, a degree of cross-bench agreement that reflects how far the structural critique travelled beyond its origins in the outage inquiry.

The other ten recommendations

Beyond the authority proposal, the committee recommended mandatory network roaming so that a customer stranded on a failed network can automatically connect through a rival carrier to reach Triple Zero.^[3] Remaining recommendations cover minimum service standards with compensation obligations, a text-to-Triple Zero capability, and expanded powers for the communications regulator.

Hanson-Young said that when you need to call the ambulance, it shouldn't matter what phone company you're with or what type of phone you have.^[3] The roaming recommendation targets precisely the scenario the 2025 outage exposed, where an Optus subscriber in a remote area had no fallback to a Telstra or other carrier signal during the failure.

Telstra's position on roaming

Telstra said mandated domestic roaming would place "extraordinary demand" on remaining networks during an outage, a concern it raised publicly at its August 2026 earnings call.^[5] The company has not publicly responded to the specific authority proposal tabled in the final report.

Telstra's network would, under mandatory roaming, become the de facto emergency backbone whenever a rival carrier failed, absorbing load it was not dimensioned to carry. The committee's view, implicit in the recommendation, is that this is a design requirement to be engineered rather than a commercial objection to be accommodated.

What comes next

The government now holds 11 recommendations requiring a formal response, with the response timetable under standing orders running from the 21 September 2026 tabling date.

Elias Thorne

Elias Thorne writes about interest rates, the bond market and the Reserve Bank. He is interested in what monetary policy actually does to household budgets, and in the long stretches of economic history that tend to repeat.