A Senate inquiry has recommended creating a national authority to oversee a key part of Australia's Triple Zero service following a series of telecommunications outages.
The final report makes 11 recommendations, including removing the Emergency Call Person function from Telstra, mandating domestic roaming, setting minimum reliability standards, introducing automatic compensation for outage-affected customers and enabling emergency text messages.
The inquiry began after the September 2025 Optus outage and expanded as further emergency-call failures involving major telecommunications providers and mobile devices emerged. The committee's report was supported by Coalition, Labor and Greens members, although Labor senators recorded reservations about some proposals, including mandatory roaming.
Telstra told ABC News it would carefully consider the findings. It also said it remained concerned mandatory roaming could reduce long-term infrastructure diversity and resilience.
Sources: ABC News, updated 21 September 2026; Parliament of Australia inquiry page.
Image disclosure: The featured image is an AI-generated conceptual editorial illustration. It does not depict a real emergency, call centre, government system or telecommunications network.
