Optus boss readies for Senate grilling

Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is preparing to defend her leadership publicly after two high-profile disasters within 13 months, with Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young revealing the key questions the embattled chief executive must answer.

Bayer Rosmarin has presided over both one of the nation’s worst outages and one of the worst data breaches in recent history, heaping pressure on the leader of what is Australia’s second-largest telco. At 9am on Friday, the Senate will demand answers in a two-hour grilling to be chaired by Hanson-Young.

The public mood against Optus remains one of acute anger and a source, close to Optus not authorised to speak publicly, said that Bayer Rosmarin had spent much of the past week calling the telco’s small business customers to personally apologise for the outage.

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will front a public Senate committee hearing in Canberra on Friday morning.Credit: Michael Quelch

Executives at Optus are preparing for Bayer Rosmarin to be a political “punching bag”, the source said, with some of the telco’s PR team redeployed to help the executive prepare to answer questions about technical details of the outage and the telco’s decision to offer its customers 200 gigabytes of free data rather than monetary compensation.

Optus’ executives are also expecting a more personal line of questioning related to Bayer Rosmarin’s movements on Wednesday and her about her ongoing leadership of the company. They also say there is no evidence she is likely to step down from the role she has held since April 1, 2020.

Optus sources have also expressed frustration that Bayer Rosmarin’s communication with customers hasn’t matched her communication with employees, which they say has been impressive.

“We are preparing to fully co-operate with the Senate inquiry,” an Optus spokeswoman said when contacted for comment.

Hanson-Young will chair the Senate hearing, to be heard under the auspices of the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications. It’s the first of a number of probes into the outage including post-incident reviews by both the Communications Department and communications watchdog, the Australian Communications Media Authority.

Last week’s outage left some 10 million Australians without phone service or access to the internet, and crippled access to vital triple-zero emergency services for some customers.

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

As first reported by this masthead, the unnamed “international peering network” that Optus said had contributed to its 16-hour-long network meltdown was later revealed to be run by its Singaporean parent company Singtel.

“The Optus CEO has questions to answer tomorrow and the Senate will demand honest answers,” Hanson-Young told this masthead.

“How many people were unable to dial 000 during the 14-hour outage? “Why did Optus fail so dismally to communicate to the public and their customers?

“How can the tokenistic offer of 200GB of data possibly constitute fair compensation for those who were unable to work, contact loved ones or go about their daily lives? Did Optus put its profits ahead of the public interest?”

“I will be asking what happened and what Optus is doing to ensure this kind of catastrophic failure does not happen again,” senator Hanson-Young said.

The terms of reference for Friday’s hearing include the steps that Optus is taking to ensure that a similar national outage doesn’t happen again; the 200 gigabytes of compensation offered to affected customers; and the role of government in ensuring Australians have reliable access to telecommunications technology.

Other committee members include Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes, and Labor senators Karen Grogan and Catryna Bilyk.

“The Optus outage last week that impacted millions of Australian consumers and small businesses was incredibly concerning,” Grogan said in a statement.

“The Senate has an important role to play in understanding what happened, and where to from here”.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.

Most Viewed in Business

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article