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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-10-16 Daily Xml
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Optus Emergency Outage

Mrs HURN (Schubert) (14:16): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. When was the minister himself or his team first alerted to any problems with 000 calls on 18 September and, importantly, what actions were initiated as a result?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:17): I reiterate what the Minister for Emergency Services has said and what the Premier said in terms of what the situation was with Optus both here and in Western Australia and the Northern Territory being completely unacceptable. There is a lot of national action that is now underway to make sure that such an event doesn't happen again.

As both the Premier and I have said in the media previously, and I believe Rob Elliott has said to a parliamentary committee already as well, we were notified at, I believe, just after 1pm on the day, that there were some issues that were being looked into in terms of the 000 response from Optus. We were certainly not aware of those at that stage, of the extent of this issue nor the time of this issue. SAAS were then advised at about 2pm that those issues had been resolved.

It wasn't until the next day, at the press conference, that we found out the extent of these issues, how long it had been going on for, how many calls were affected and the really distressing impact in terms of a number of people whose lives were lost where 000 was not able to be connected. In fact, the next day, my office in the morning received updates from SAAS that we believed at that stage that there was very small impact and a very small number of calls affected at that stage.

So, as the Premier has outlined, we believe that the lack of communication with the South Australian government was completely unacceptable, and that's one of the issues that we have raised very strongly and will be raising very strongly as part of the federal review that will be taking place into this matter.

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