As the government faced questions over the Telstra outage, opposition leader Angus Taylor was forced to defend a series of own goals by his team, undermining the Coalition's attack on Labor.
Telstra outage exposes Coalition's own communications failures
Millions of phone connections went out for hours on Wednesday, halting trains, freezing Eftpos transactions, and causing hundreds of triple zero calls to fail. While Telstra bears primary responsibility, questions remain about regulation of the telecommunications sector and whether lessons from last year's Optus outage have been applied.
However, at his Thursday press conference, Taylor was defending shadow minister Sarah Henderson's decision to 'test' calling triple zero and his own invocation of possible Chinese interference without evidence. Experts have found no evidence of malicious activity by any foreign power as of Thursday afternoon.
Henderson's triple-zero test draws criticism
Henderson admitted calling triple zero and being unable to connect, but the government noted it is an offence to unnecessarily ring the emergency line. She spent a 12-minute interview defending her conduct to the ABC's Patricia Karvelas, denying criminal wrongdoing but adding 'I accept the criticism'. Acting communications minister Kristy McBain scolded her for 'prank calling triple zero'.
Meanwhile, South Australian police minister Michael Brown initially challenged a claim by senator Kerrynne Liddle that a person had died after being unable to reach emergency services. Brown said 'if people are going to make claims publicly, they need to be able to back them up'. Liddle responded she was 'disappointed' Brown questioned her integrity. Late Thursday, SA police confirmed a person had died in a regional hospital on Wednesday and that the death would be investigated by the coroner.
Taylor's China interference claim backfires
Taylor's first contribution on the outage was to criticise the government for not 'fronting up' and to invoke Chinese interference, a theory publicly aired only by Barnaby Joyce. However, at the same time, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was giving an update on Telstra, and McBain had already issued a statement. Communications minister Anika Wells rushed back from leave for a 1.45pm press conference.
Taylor, unsympathetic to an unplanned outage during planned leave, claimed Wells had 'for seven hours said nothing'.
Growing frustration within Coalition
There is growing frustration among some in the Coalition that under Taylor, the opposition is spending too much time cleaning up its own errors. They point to a day last month when the government confirmed tax changes after a deal with the Greens, but Taylor instead garnered headlines by tripping himself up over whether he backed multiculturalism in Australia.
As the line often misattributed to Winston Churchill goes: 'never waste a crisis'. Taylor's mantra increasingly seems to be 'never fail to waste a crisis'. The opposition has fertile ground to pressure the government, but its own communications failures are undermining that effort.
