OPINION: Australian Communications Minister Anika Wells has spent days criticising Optus over the recent Triple Zero outage — and yes, it was a serious failure. But the reality is that much of the problem stems from her own department’s regulatory shortcomings, not just the carriers or Samsung.

The real question is: Is this an attempt by an ill-informed minister to deflect blame, when it was actually the poor performance of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) — the very body tasked with regulating and certifying mobile devices — that helped create the problem?

The Self-Regulation Problem

Under current rules, the Labor Government allows smartphone manufacturers to self-regulate — with no active, mandatory policing of devices entering the Australian market.

At the ce

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