The Liberal MP for Lindsay, Melissa McIntosh, who is trying to decide where she sits in party’s Overton scribble at the moment asks Anika Wells:

It has been 565 days since the Bean Review made 18 critical recommendations to government to fix the triple-0 network after the first Optus outage. 18 months on, with a triple-0 crisis, and sadly deaths, why hasn’t the government implemented all the recommendations and will the minister apologise for the government’s delay in acting on these vital recommendations?

Wells:

I invite her to read the Bean Review which has 18 recommendations, 13 of which are now complete, and five which are still in implementation. Of those five, recommendations 3 and 4 pertain to new industry codes in testing of both devices and networks. Recommendation 14 is around temporary outage roaming during natural disasters, and recommendation 15 is a new tribunal assistance of memorandum of understanding. I make these points because the common thread, Mr Speaker is that in each of those four recommendations they are either being led or depend on industry.

So, at my meeting with the chief executives of the three telcos who I summonsed to Canberra earlier today ahead of introducing the triple-0 custodian legislation, I urged industry to go faster on those remaining four recommendations that they have carriage of, and I’m pleased to update the House, Mr Speaker, that they agreed to do so.

One of the good things about this new law is that it creates new levers for the custodian to press industry when they are to get or not with improvement. That is an improvement that will be delivered by the passage of the legislation, with I is why, Mr Speaker, I was very disturbed to hear on Sky News just before question time, after the introduction of legislation, for which the Shadow Minister for Communications was in the House to listen to, that she equivocated on whether the opposition would support the triple-0 custodian bill. This is a shadow minister who is on record criticising me for not going faster when presented with the opportunity to support the bill, dithered and equivocated over whether the opposition would support it. Our role here is to build confidence in the triple-0 system. I have been working as fast as I can to bring this legislation to this place. The question in the legislation, Mr Speaker, is very simple and it should not be difficult for the opposition to answer. The question is: Do you support a stronger custodian for triple-0? If the answer is yes and if you want to be useful, then stop politicising this crisis and support the bill.