Andrew McKellar interview on ABC News Breakfast about the Telstra outage
Transcript: 9 July, 2026
Catherine Murphy:
Andrew McKellar from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry joins us now. Good morning to you, Andrew.
Andrew McKellar:
Morning, Catherine. Good morning, Emma.
Catherine Murphy:
Now I know that this is still developing and it will take time to really estimate the total cost of this disruption, but can you give us a ballpark of what yesterday's disruption costs to the economy?
Andrew McKellar:
Well, very difficult to put a number on it, but I think what you said, it goes beyond inconvenience. So I think for small businesses in particular, their mobile connectivity, connectivity to payment systems, this is absolutely vital. So if you have an outage like this, which is occurring during business hours, that's lost sales. So it really is fundamental, particularly for small business customers. And Telstra is the elephant in the room. They have a very dominant position in terms of market share. A lot of small businesses are relying on them for that service. So we certainly saw that there were impacts yesterday. It was difficult for many businesses to reach their customers or for their customers to contact them, and there was certainly disruptions with payment systems. So it's going to take a little bit of time to sort that out. Of course, yesterday the priority was ensuring that people were safe, that people could get through emergency services, all those things.
And I think businesses understand that, but there will be a real impact here. And I think the message from small business to Telstra is listen to your customers, consider your customers. I think here, if there's been an impact for some of those businesses, then I think it will be back to Telstra to see whatever they can do to help try and redress this and offset some of that negative impact that would've occurred yesterday.
Emma Rebellato:
What do you mean by that? In terms of compensation?
Andrew McKellar:
Well, I think here Telstra's got to have a look at that. There'd be different impacts. Not everyone will have been affected the same. For some it will be a financial loss. So I think really they've got to look at those individual circumstances and try and work through those issues. The broader issue here though is the reliability of the system. And it's not just Telstra, we've seen this right across the network now, that each of the telcos has faced their own issues. We really have to have that surety of reliability of the system. If that's breaking down on a repeated basis, then we've really got to look at how we can address that and provide that greater surety to the community.
Catherine Murphy:
Would you like to see compensation though for businesses?
Andrew McKellar:
Look, I think that's difficult. I mean, clearly all of the telcos are regulated here. There is a national regulator, the communications and media authority. I think it's up to them to enforce the standards. They've got to work with the telcos to make sure that those standards are being met and that these sorts of outages aren't occurring where they could be prevented. And I think that's really what the focus has got to be on now.
Emma Rebellato:
How do businesses even calculate their losses?
Andrew McKellar:
Well, that's going to be very difficult. And obviously we've reached out and we've said amongst our network, please let us know, provide the examples. In many cases, it'll have to be between Telstra and the customer directly, I would say. Telstra, be responsive, listen to your customers, try to ensure where you can. If you can offset some of those impacts, then we think that's the fair thing to do.
Catherine Murphy:
Andrew, does this outage undermine confidence in Australian business for global companies who might want to invest in Australia? Will this make them have doubts? It's not the first outage.
Andrew McKellar:
No, and I think this is an issue. So of course Australia is competing for investment. We have to present ourselves as being a great destinational location to do business. Communications is such a huge part of doing business today. You've got to have that connectivity, you've got to have that reliability. And I think here the issue for the telcos that are in the market currently is others will be looking at this. There are disruptors in the market internationally that can say, "Oh, we can provide a better service. You don't have to rely on the domestic network. You can get a satellite link or you can get something else." So I do think here, of course, for all of those providers in the market, they are regulated. They have to meet certain standards, but it is a competitive market and others can come in and if they can provide a better service, then that's going to be compelling.
Emma Rebellato:
Andrew, I think a lot of people are saying that this outage yet again shows that we can be pretty vulnerable in many areas. So what can we do about it? Can small business do anything about it? Large business do anything about it?
Andrew McKellar:
Well, I think it's particularly difficult for small business. They really are relying on having those services there and that when they need them, they'll work as they're intended to do. So I think we've got to be careful here about overreacting. I don't think we want to add more cost and too much more regulatory compliance into the system, but I do think we've got to be working with the regulators, with the telcos, with government to ensure that the community gets the standards of service that it really is looking for and that we need as part of the modern world economy.
Catherine Murphy:
Andrew McKellar, thank you so much for your time this morning. We appreciate it.