As the government was being questioned over the regulation of telcos and the latest massive Telstra outage, the opposition leader, Angus Taylor, was being asked about communications failures of a different kind: his own, and those of his ministerial team.
Millions of phone connections around the country went out for hours 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’s devastating Optus outage and made the necessary changes.
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’s decision to “test” calling triple zero; and his own invocation, with zero evidence, of the possibility of Chinese interference.
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.
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 – despite relentless media criticism of Labor for handing down an unpopular budget, and One Nation plateauing in the polls after its meteoric rise – is not just failing to make ground but is somehow still losing support.
The first contribution from Taylor on the Telstra outage on Wednesday morning was to criticise the government for not “fronting up”, and to invoke the prospect of Chinese interference – a theory which had only been publicly aired by Barnaby Joyce.
Never mind that, at the very same time as Taylor’s press conference, the prime minister – freshly returned from a Pacific diplomatic tour – 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’s name was then issued around lunchtime, delayed only due to critical facts constantly changing.
Wells rushed back from leave to hold a press conference at 1.45pm.
Taylor, unsympathetic to an unplanned outage happening during planned leave, trumpeted that Wells had “for seven hours said nothing”.
Henderson’s contribution was to announce she’d 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’s interrogation of the issue, but instead had to spend a torturous 12-minute interview defending her own conduct to the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas.
Henderson denied criminal wrongdoing, protesting she was “doing my job” but adding “I accept the criticism”. McBain scolded her for “prank calling triple zero”.
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.
Brown said: “if people are going to make claims publicly, they need to be able to back them up”. Liddle responded that she was “disappointed” Brown “chose to front the media and question my integrity in this process”, and said she had referred the family who had contacted her office to the police.
Late on Thursday, SA police released a statement saying they had been able to make contact with the deceased person’s family after visiting Liddle’s 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.
That confirmation came after Taylor spent a press conference on Thursday having to defend himself and his colleagues.
There is a growing frustration among some in the Coalition that, under Taylor, the opposition is spending too much time cleaning up its own errors; conceding avoidable own goals when it should be booting the ball into the open net of Labor’s mistakes.
They point to a day last month when the government confirmed it was going to ram through its contentious tax changes after a deal with the Greens – a move the Coalition described as a “broken promise” – but Taylor instead garnered headlines by tripping himself up over whether he backed multiculturalism in Australia.
There’s a line often misattributed to Winston Churchill: “never waste a crisis”. Taylor’s mantra increasingly seems to be “never fail to waste a crisis”.
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.
