Greens senator and committee chair Sarah Hanson-Young has pushed Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady on statistics showing the telco’s network is suffering increasing outages, citing 3641 instances reported in 2024 up to 5221 in 2025.
Brady said “certain things in a year can affect it” and that weather events such as cyclones and bushfires are a key factor. “The single biggest cause of outages on our network relates to power, and so there is absolutely a reliance on making sure that we get continuity and consistency of power,” she added.
Brady then began speaking of Telstra’s investment in its network in the last 12 months to achieve “better resilience”.
This and a subsequent mention of “resilience” from Brady appears to infuriate Hanson-Young.
“Last week proves that to be an absolute furphy, Ms Brady,” Hanson-Young said. “Since September last year. All of the warning signs were there, and I remember having you and your representatives before this committee, knowing that Optus had had this terrible outage, and you’re all pretty smug about it. ‘Oh, that’s an Optus problem’. Well, I’m sorry, today we see it’s not an Optus problem, it’s also a Telstra problem.
“So when you’re banking huge increases in profit, there are more outages, less reliability for people to access and use their mobile phone. I don’t think it washes to go around telling people that your system’s resilient. It’s clearly not,” the senator said.