Australian Senate calls for nationalized Triple Zero emergency service

An Australian Senate committee issued 11 recommendations after repeated Triple Zero (000) outages, including creating a statutory authority to take over the Emergency Call Person role from Telstra, which has run the service since 1961 and handles about 11.7 million calls a year.

• Senate recommends a statutory authority replace Telstra as Emergency Call Person
• Telstra handles about 11.7 million Triple Zero calls a year, roughly 32,000 a day
• Optus was fined AU$12m over a 2023 outage; four people died in a 2024 failure
• Senator Hanson-Young declared the end of the era of self-regulation for telcos