{"id":788731,"date":"2026-07-09T07:46:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T07:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/788731\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T07:46:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T07:46:17","slug":"as-the-telstra-crisis-unfolded-the-coalition-fell-victim-to-another-communications-failure-australian-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/788731\/","title":{"rendered":"As the Telstra crisis unfolded, the Coalition fell victim to another communications failure | Australian politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the government was being questioned over the regulation of telcos and the latest massive Telstra outage, the opposition leader, Angus Taylor<\/a>, was being asked about communications failures of a different kind: his own, and those of his ministerial team.<\/p>\n

Millions of phone connections around the country went out for hours<\/a> on Wednesday. Trains ground to a halt, Eftpos transactions went blank, hundreds of triple zero calls failed and welfare checks were being urgently carried out. The bulk of the fault lies with Telstra. But there are important questions to answer about whether the critical telecommunications sector is being appropriately regulated, and whether the government has learned from last year\u2019s devastating Optus outage<\/a> and made the necessary changes.<\/p>\n

All points on which the opposition could pursue the government. But at his press conference on Thursday, Taylor was instead forced to defend a growing list of gaffes made by his team: Sarah Henderson\u2019s decision to \u201ctest\u201d calling triple zero<\/a>; and his own invocation, with zero evidence, of the possibility of Chinese interference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Experts have, as of Thursday afternoon, no evidence of any such malicious activity by any foreign power. That may change. But it does politicians no favours to air such serious allegations in a crisis while the facts are, at best, in dispute.<\/p>\n

Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n

While the communications minister, Anika Wells, rushed back from leave, and government figures from Anthony Albanese down gave regular updates through the media, Taylor and his team were struggling to stop tripping over their own feet. It has been a two-day play on why the Coalition<\/a> \u2013 despite relentless media criticism of Labor for handing down an unpopular budget, and One Nation plateauing in the polls after its meteoric rise \u2013 is not just failing to make ground but is somehow still losing support.<\/p>\n

The first contribution from Taylor on the Telstra<\/a> outage on Wednesday morning was to criticise the government for not \u201cfronting up\u201d, and to invoke the prospect of Chinese interference \u2013 a theory which had only been publicly aired by Barnaby Joyce.<\/p>\n

Never mind that, at the very same time as Taylor\u2019s press conference, the prime minister \u2013 freshly returned from a Pacific diplomatic tour \u2013 was giving an update on Telstra. Or that the acting communications minister, Kristy McBain, had already issued a statement. A second public statement in Wells\u2019s name was then issued around lunchtime, delayed only due to critical facts constantly changing.<\/p>\n

Wells rushed back from leave to hold a press conference at 1.45pm.<\/p>\n

Taylor, unsympathetic to an unplanned outage happening during planned leave, trumpeted that Wells had \u201cfor seven hours said nothing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Henderson\u2019s contribution was to announce she\u2019d called triple zero and been unable to connect, an admission soon seized on by the government after it was pointed out it is an offence to unnecessarily ring the emergency line. The shadow communications minister is meant to be leading the opposition\u2019s interrogation of the issue, but instead had to spend a torturous 12-minute interview defending her own conduct to the ABC\u2019s Patricia Karvelas.<\/p>\n

Henderson denied criminal wrongdoing, protesting she was \u201cdoing my job\u201d but adding \u201cI accept the criticism\u201d. McBain scolded her for \u201cprank calling triple zero\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the South Australian police minister, Michael Brown, initially challenged a claim made by Senator Kerrynne Liddle that a person in that state had died after being unable to reach emergency services.<\/p>\n

Brown, said: \u201cif people are going to make claims publicly, they need to be able to back them up\u201d. Liddle responded that she was \u201cdisappointed\u201d Brown \u201cchose to front the media and question my integrity in this process\u201d, and said she had referred the family who had contacted her office to the police.<\/p>\n

Late on Thursday, SA police released a statement saying they had been able to make contact with the deceased person\u2019s family after visiting Liddle\u2019s office and speaking with her and her staff, and confirmed that a person had died in a regional hospital on Wednesday. Their death will be investigated by the coroner.<\/p>\n

That confirmation came after Taylor spent a press conference on Thursday having to defend himself and his colleagues.<\/p>\n

There is a growing frustration among some in the Coalition<\/a> that, under Taylor, the opposition is spending too much time cleaning up its own errors; conceding avoidable own goals <\/a>when it should be booting the ball into the open net of Labor\u2019s mistakes.<\/p>\n

They point to a day last month when the government confirmed it was going to ram through its contentious tax changes<\/a> after a deal with the Greens \u2013 a move the Coalition described as a \u201cbroken promise\u201d \u2013 but Taylor instead garnered headlines by tripping himself up over whether he backed multiculturalism<\/a> in Australia.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a line often misattributed to Winston Churchill: \u201cnever waste a crisis\u201d. Taylor\u2019s mantra increasingly seems to be \u201cnever fail to waste a crisis\u201d.<\/p>\n

The opposition has some fertile ground to heap pressure on this government. But Taylor and his colleagues are not doing themselves any favours with their own communications failures.<\/p>\n

This story was updated on 9 July 2026 to include the statement from SA police.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the government was being questioned over the regulation of telcos and the latest massive Telstra outage, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-788731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}