The communications minister has defended her handling of a deadly triple-zero outage following opposition attacks she was too slow to respond to the crisis.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley criticised the minister in parliament after Anika Wells described herself as a "new minister" 147 days after being sworn in to her portfolio.
"Being new is no excuse. Australians dialling triple zero in an emergency cannot wait for you to learn," Ms Ley said during question time on Tuesday.
"The minister is not across her brief and, by her own admission, people have died."
Several questions were fired at Ms Wells after legislation was introduced to parliament enshrining a triple-zero watchdog into law.
It was tabled on Tuesday, 18 months after being recommended following a review into the November 2023 Optus outage that resulted in the failure of more than 2100 emergency calls.
Ms Wells' Liberal counterpart Melissa McIntosh asked why it took so long to implement the laws.
The minister said the blame laid squarely at the feet of Optus.
"The only thing that could have stopped Optus from having this outage was Optus themselves," Ms Wells said.
"They are responsible for their failure and they are held to account for their failure."
The review recommendations were accepted, but the custodian has operated administratively within the Department of Communications since March.
The Optus outage in September resulted in hundreds of failed calls and was linked to three deaths after a firewall update of its network led to customers not being able to access the triple-zero network.
Ms Wells defended being out of the country following the deadly outage to attend the United Nations General Assembly, where she spruiked Australia's efforts to ban social media for under-16s to world leaders.
She attended the event in New York alongside NSW mother Emma Mason, who lost her daughter to suicide after she was bullied online.
"Our bipartisan new laws to delay access to social media are one of the most important things our nation has ever done and they have potential to change the world," Ms Wells said.
"That is why I was at the United Nations. The member would know if they had met with the bereaved families who have been lobbying for these laws for many years."
Ms Wells and other ministers met with chief executives from Optus, Telstra and TPG on Tuesday, before the bill was introduced.
Embattled Optus boss Stephen Rue arrived at Parliament House saying he was "looking forward to meeting the minister".
In a joint statement, the telecommunications giants said the meeting was "constructive" and vowed to take action on protecting the integrity of the triple-zero emergency system.
"Australians need to be able to trust that calls to triple zero will work when it matters most, and we take that responsibility seriously," Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady, TPG chief executive Inaki Berroeta and Mr Rue said.
"While no network is infallible and outages can occur due to factors such as severe weather, power loss or technical faults, our focus is on minimising the risk of disruption and responding swiftly when issues arise."
Under the triple-zero custodian laws, telcos will have to provide real-time reporting of outages to ACMA and emergency services from November, and ensure upgrades and maintenance of their system don't result in outages.
Ms Wells said she told the telco bosses it was their legal obligation to ensure Australians had reliable access to triple zero ahead of the approaching national disaster season.
"Optus and all telecommunications carriers have no excuses for triple-zero outages," she told the House of Representatives as she introduced the bill.
Optus and ACMA are undertaking separate reviews into the September 18 outage.
