MATT SHIRVINGTON, HOST: The bosses of Optus, TPG and Telstra have been ordered to Canberra tomorrow for a grilling following the fatal Triple Zero outage. Communications Minister Anika Wells has penned letters to the heads of each company urging more needs to be done to restore faith in the critical service. This comes as the government pushes ahead with reforms as well, ensuring future outages are properly reported moving forward. And for more, Communications Minister Anika Wells joins me now live. Great to have you with us.

MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS ANIKA WELLS: Morning, Matt.

SHIRVINGTON: So we're all reporting that it's going to be a grilling for these telco bosses. What are you going to say, and what's going to come out of these meetings?

WELLS: Well, I will literally be laying down the law and we'll be bringing more laws to the parliament later this week. Australians must have confidence in the reliability of our Triple Zero system. They must do that, and telcos need to do better. They need to do better and they'll be getting together with me in Canberra tomorrow to make sure that we are all from our individual positions in the system doing everything we can to make sure that Australians do and can have confidence in Triple Zero ahead of natural disaster season.

SHIRVINGTON: Can I ask you a personal question? Do you lose sleep over this sort of stuff knowing that if this isn't sorted out- and considering that fatal outage happened almost three weeks ago, this meeting happening only now and these new reforms potentially coming in on 1 November, is enough being done? Do you feel like there is enough being done right now?

WELLS: I absolutely lose sleep over this. As the steward of the system, I do take very seriously my responsibility to make the system work as well as it possibly can. And if we have to accept that outages will occur, we should not accept that the system fails. The system must not fail. I think Australians are right to expect that it won't fail, and they're right to be white-hot angry with Optus about their catastrophic failure in this situation.

SHIRVINGTON: What about the anger towards the Labor Government at the moment? Because in 2023, there was a review done, an Optus outage, very similar circumstances, although not as dire. In 2023, of course, you've been left holding the bag. You're the Communications Minister now. Has enough been done by the Labor Government since that review?

WELLS: Matt, you're right to point out that Optus has failed twice here, a first time in 2023, and again a few weeks ago. And in response to that, yes, the Albanese Government stepped up and put measures and now laws in place to make sure that this doesn't happen again, because Australians must have confidence in the system. After this week, once we legislate, there will never have been stronger laws and stronger powers for the regulator here to crack down on telcos when they fail Australians.

SHIRVINGTON: The question is though, should it have been done years ago and avoided September?

ANIKA WELLS: Well, there's nothing that anybody, whether the independent regulator, other telcos have pointed out yet, that any of us could have done to stop the failures that happened at Optus from happening at Optus. What happened here, Matt, was a failure by Optus to comply with existing laws. And the laws that we're bringing in this week, not to be confusing, are to further enshrine confidence of taxpayers in the Triple Zero system. The laws that are coming this week would not have stopped what happened at Optus a couple of weeks ago because that was a catastrophic failure, a second on the part of Optus.

MATT SHIRVINGTON: Okay, will they stop it happening again?

ANIKA WELLS: Well, the idea of the Triple Zero custodian, and that position has been- it was an office that has been in place since March of this year, it's already in place and operating out of the Department of Communications, is to be a holistic, best practice custodian of the system. Not to relitigate history, but Telecom, it used to be the case that the whole system was governed by the government, then it became Telstra. Now, there's no one person who looks at the whole system and makes sure that it's operating at best practice. The Triple Zero custodian started that work in March, and this week we’ll enshrine it in the law.

MATT SHIRVINGTON: Okay, no one wants this to happen. Minister, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Good luck.

ANIKA WELLS: Thanks, Matt. Have a good day.