Australia politics live: telcos face steeper outage fines; Hastie warns Liberals can’t keep living in the Howard era

Harsher penalties for failing to connect customers to triple zero; Liberal MP reportedly tells party meeting ‘world has changed’. Follow the latest updates liveGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastMore than 50,000 students will sit a VCE examination today as the English and English as an Additional Language papers are held across Victorian testing centres.In total, around 92,000 students will complete at least one VCE exam this year, and around 67,000 are expected to graduate with a VCE certificate. English has the most enrolments of any subject, with around 47,000 students sitting the written exam, while just over 3,000 are sitting English as an Additional Language.I wish you all the best for your VCE exams, and would like to acknowledge and thank the teachers, school staff and families who have supported you through to your very own Grand Final.I will be issuing a direction to the Acma to amend the Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages) Industry Standard 2024 (CCO Standard) to mandate that telecommunications providers maintain a public register of their network outages.
A public register of network outages will increase transparency and accountability around outages and related impacts on access to triple zero. Continue reading...