A cross‑party Senate inquiry into Australia’s Triple Zero emergency service has recommended major reforms, including transferring the Emergency Call Person function from Telstra to a statutory public authority and establishing universal domestic roaming for voice and text to bolster resilience during outages.

The final report outlines 11 recommendations, with emphasis on government operation of the emergency call function and a move toward national‑interest management run by the government rather than private carriers.

The inquiry notes repeated high‑tech outages have damaged public trust and cites recent outages tied to Optus and Telstra as evidence of systemic weaknesses requiring overhaul.

The inquiry was sparked by a run of outages over the past year, including the September 2025 Optus failure linked to two deaths and a major July 2026 Telstra outage, highlighting gaps in emergency call connectivity.

Among the reforms are a modernised Telecommunications Act, a national text‑based method for contacting Triple Zero, and mandatory domestic roaming for both calls and messaging to improve accessibility during outages.

The report also calls on Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone to allow customers of rival networks to use each other’s towers in emergencies and to publish outage data in annual reports to increase transparency.

Additional recommendations include shared technical specifications among operators and device manufacturers, and a review of the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s powers related to Triple Zero.

The inquiry’s chair frames the proposed nationalisation of Emergency Call oversight as urgent, arguing technology and public needs require aligning regulation with modern capabilities.

Government reform efforts are underway, with ministers signaling ongoing enhancements to Triple Zero and a push for reliability, while leaving room for consideration of the committee’s recommendations.

However, some lawmakers warn that reforms like roaming mandates and an independent review risk being token measures if the broader telecom infrastructure remains outdated or underfunded.

Analysts caution that without substantial investment, stronger regulatory powers, and robust governance, routine reforms may fail to fix core reliability problems and must be part of a broader infrastructure upgrade.

The overall push stresses accountability and urgent action to protect public safety and critical infrastructure, drawing on international examples of roaming reforms while prioritising resilience.