Telstra (Australia’s largest telco) nationwide outage due to known issue with a server that should have been replaced 10 years ago.
Welcome to Talking Business, a podcast produced in Melbourne Australia, built on the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation. The podcast is available on the Acast site, my own website, the Apple podcast store or wherever you go to get your podcasts. Or you can get it at the Business Acumen website at businessacumen.biz.
I am Leon Gettler. My job is review and monitor the week’s news in business finance and economics. I bring it all to you every week.
For the most exclusive access to leading economists and business leaders from around the world, subscribe to Talking Business from my website leongettler.com or whatever your favourite podcast platform is.
This is episode number 24 in our series for 2026 and today’s date is Friday July 17
First, I’ll be talking to Jane Hardy, a former Australian diplomat and foreign policy expert with more than three decades of experience in international affairs, diplomacy and strategic policy. We’ll talk about the Hormuz war and oil, and negotiations with the US over tariffs
And I’ll be talking to RMIT professor Sinclair Davidson about the rise of One Nation, whether that reflects people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the economy and the political fallout for all parties.
But first let’s talk to Jane Hardy.
So what’s happening in the news?
Things just got a lot more tense in the Gulf. Iran announced it’s closing the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas — as a pressure tactic against Trump. At the same time, Tehran fired missiles and drones at US-aligned states like Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. This all blows up a ceasefire that’s barely three months old. The US responded with a fourth wave of strikes and insists the strait is still open. Analysts say Iran’s new, untested leadership is betting Trump won’t escalate further — but it’s a dangerous gamble that could tip the region back into full-blown war.
President Trump wants to slap a 20% fee on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz — framing it as payment for the U.S. military protection those vessels get in the waterway. And shipping industry folks are pretty alarmed. Why? Because the math is brutal. Right now it costs roughly $10 a barrel to ship oil from the Persian Gulf to Europe. Add a 20% cut on an $80 barrel of oil, and you’re tacking on another $16 — nearly tripling the transport cost to around $26 a barrel. Scale that up to a supertanker carrying two million barrels, and you’re looking at an extra $30 million bill. Guess who eventually eats that? Consumers, at least partly. For context on how steep this is: there’s a similar voluntary fee for the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia, and that one runs under half a percent of cargo value. So 20% is in a totally different universe. Now, some analysts are skeptical this fee ever actually happens — it’s just too costly and complicated. And honestly, ship operators say they’ve got bigger worries right now: the shooting war between the U.S. and Iran. Iran’s been striking vessels using the U.S.-guided route near Oman, and the U.S. hit back with attacks on Iran. Trump also announced he’s reinstating a naval blockade on ships using Iranian ports. There’s also an irony here — the U.S. has traditionally been the champion of free navigation through international waterways, and has criticized Iran for trying to charge its own fees on ships. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said just weeks ago that no country can legally toll an international waterway. So Trump proposing this fee is a bit of a reversal. Iran’s foreign minister even jumped in, saying on social media that 20% is too much — and that Iran will “be fair” — which is its own kind of pointed jab. Bottom line: shippers now face a nasty choice if this fee is real — pay up and risk getting caught in the crossfire, or route through Iran’s blessing instead and risk defying Washington. Either way, it’s another sign of how unstable the region has become for anyone moving oil through that chokepoint.
Albanese is centralizing AI policy — new “Office of AI” under his own department, national AI standards, and clear expectations for big players like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google to keep their “social licence” here. It’s a shift from the hands-off approach since the 2025 election, as public unease grows over data centres popping up nationwide. The stakes are real: Australia pulled in $10 billion in data centre investment in 2024, second globally only to the US. Anthropic alone wants 1.4+ gigawatts of capacity — a build costing up to $21.6 billion — but that’s contingent on Australia sorting out copyright rules for AI training, which Albanese was vague on. Global backdrop: UN chief Guterres warned AI is being rolled out “without a plan and without consent.” Canada just dropped its own five-year AI strategy. And back home, ex-minister Ed Husic is pushing back hard, arguing “social licence” isn’t enough — his line: we don’t let pharma companies self-regulate on trust alone, so why AI?
Remember that Telstra outage that knocked out Triple Zero calls and stopped trains? Turns out it might be a sign of things to come. Analysts say as networks get more complex — especially with AI creeping into 5G and future 6G systems — these kinds of failures are only going to become more common. Experts are now pushing for a national resilience strategy rather than treating each outage as a one-off “Telstra problem.” Telstra, for its part, says more regulation isn’t the answer and points to its $12 billion-plus network investment over the past seven years.
This one’s got real teeth. A Senate inquiry, chaired by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, is now digging into whether Telstra skimped on tech investment before the outage. The kicker: the failure may have come down to outdated equipment that could’ve been replaced for around $22,000. Hanson-Young wants answers on compensation for affected businesses and commuters, and she’s even questioning whether Telstra should keep running the Triple Zero contract at all. Telstra’s CEO cut her holiday short to apologize publicly.
Telstra’s massive outage last week is turning into a real headache for the company — and a potential windfall for affected customers. Here’s the situation: people who lost income or couldn’t reach emergency services during the outage could be owed compensation up to $100,000 through the telecom ombudsman. The outage on Wednesday cut off Triple Zero (Australia’s emergency line) access for hundreds of people, knocked out train services in Victoria and NSW, and took down payment systems nationwide. It rolled into a second-day outage on Thursday, with V/Line trains in Victoria staying suspended. The likely culprit? An old server — nearly a decade past its supported life — that was never replaced, even though a replacement would’ve cost less than $30,000. A group of 11 law firms called the Justice Network says a class action is on the table given how many people were affected. But here’s the catch — customers have to prove actual financial loss, and Telstra’s contracts (like most telcos) exclude liability for indirect or consequential losses. The big exception is Triple Zero failures, which can carry penalties up to $30 million per breach. If someone couldn’t reach emergency services in a real crisis and was harmed, that’s a much bigger legal matter than could go through the courts, not just the ombudsman. The ombudsman, Cynthia Gebert, says she’s pushing Telstra to offer a standard payout to everyone affected rather than making people apply one by one. Consumer advocates are even more pointed — the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network’s CEO said Telstra shouldn’t fob people off with something like free extra data, and argued the current system unfairly puts the burden of proof on customers who had no way to prevent the outage. Telstra’s CEO Vicki Brady has apologized again, and the company says it’s processing complaints via online and phone forms. Meanwhile, Telstra’s facing a formal investigation from the communications regulator (also carrying up to $30 million in potential penalties), plus a Senate inquiry starting Friday that’ll dig into whether Telstra’s underinvestment in tech contributed to the failure. Also worth noting: police are investigating a death in regional South Australia that occurred the same day as the outage, though it hasn’t been officially linked.
So here’s a debate bubbling away in Australian telco land: should you be able to jump onto a rival network when your own provider has no coverage? That’s basically what “domestic roaming” would mean — and there’s a fresh push to make it mandatory. A new ACCAN survey found 73% of Australians back the idea, and the group’s CEO, Carol Bennett, makes a pretty simple point: tourists visiting Australia can already roam between networks, but locals can’t. It’s a real issue on the ground too — take Gundagai on the Hume Highway, which is currently living through more than a week of patchy outages while Telstra upgrades a tower nearby. Locals there say it’s hurting business, especially with travellers passing through who can’t pay if they’re on the “wrong” network. Now, this isn’t a new debate. The ACCC actually looked at domestic roaming back in 2017 and knocked it back, worried it would kill telcos’ incentive to invest in infrastructure and wouldn’t even lower prices. But a lot’s changed since then — 3G’s been switched off, 5G’s rolled out, satellite-to-phone tech is emerging, and a 2024 government review is now recommending temporary “disaster roaming” during emergencies, plus a fresh ACCC inquiry into the bigger roaming question. The telcos themselves are split. Telstra’s against it, arguing networks are built for their own customer load and suddenly absorbing millions of extra users during an outage could actually take down other networks too. Optus is more open, saying it’s worth reconsidering, especially for regional areas. And TPG/Vodafone are firmly in favour, essentially saying “we’ve been saying this for a decade.” Interestingly, the OECD weighed in too, in its 2026 economic survey pointing to Canada as an example — mandatory roaming there helped smaller regional telcos survive, improved coverage, and pushed prices down. And that pricing angle matters — the ACCC’s own data shows telco price rises are outpacing inflation, and it’s really biting in the bush. Stories from towns like Ladysmith in the NSW Riverina show how having just one telco option can shut people out of basic transactions — a hairdresser can’t take a card payment, a canteen at a school event can’t process sales — simply because customers are on the “wrong” network. The bigger economic point, from analysts like Sasha Lennon, is that patchy connectivity isn’t just inconvenient — it’s actively pushing people and businesses away from regional Australia. So the big question for all of us: is domestic roaming the fix, or does it risk undermining investment in network infrastructure, like the ACCC originally feared back in 2017?
A new Grattan Institute report is taking aim at Australia’s Pharmacy Guild, arguing community pharmacists are overcharging patients and the government through opaque pricing deals — to the tune of billions a year. The report wants ownership and location restrictions scrapped so supermarkets and bigger chains can compete, and points to the Guild’s hefty political donations as a reason reform has stalled for decades. The Guild is firing back, saying deregulation would gut pharmacy access in rural and remote towns.
Australia’s population of 28 million has become one of the hottest markets in the world for batteries — the kind that store solar power at your house. In March alone, Australia made up almost 10% of all new global battery capacity. That’s a country of 28 million people punching way above its weight. They’re now the third-biggest battery importer in the world, behind only Germany and the US. Why? A few things lined up perfectly. Aussies already love solar — about 4 million homes, 40% of detached houses, have panels on the roof. But solar’s only useful when the sun’s out, so you need batteries to save that power for peak evening hours. Add in a wobbly coal grid and patchy connections between states, and batteries suddenly make a ton of sense. The government threw fuel on the fire with a $4.8 billion subsidy last year. It worked so well they actually had to dial back the rebate in May just to cool the market down. Right now there are 600,000 home batteries installed — more than triple what California has — and about 2,000 new ones going in every single day this year. And it’s paying off. In Victoria, homes with batteries pulled 80% less power from the grid than solar-only homes during January’s record heat. Overall, the flood of batteries helped cut power generation costs 12% in the first quarter of 2026, which means real relief on electricity bills starting this month — and even people without batteries benefit, because it eases pressure on the whole system. It’s not just homes either — there are 137 big utility-scale battery projects happening across the country, tied to major solar and wind farms, with companies like AGL, Origin, and Neoen leading the charge. Origin’s CEO summed up the vibe nicely: every battery, EV, or smart hot-water system that shifts when it draws power is “a small lever on costs” — and those savings ripple out to everyone, not just the person who bought the battery. Bottom line, as one analyst put it: “Solar ate coal’s lunch, and now batteries are eating gas’s dinner.” Australia’s aiming for 82% renewable energy by 2030, and this battery surge just made that goal a lot more realistic.
So there’s a growing scandal in the audit world, and it’s really about who’s investigating who. KPMG’s audit division got hit with whistleblower allegations. So what did they do? They brought in a top law firm, Allens, to run an “independent” investigation. The report cleared KPMG. Case closed, right? Not so fast. It turns out that investigation was pretty thin. Allens did just 14 half-hour interviews, mostly relied on partners simply saying “trust us,” and didn’t dig into a lot of evidence that was actually available. And here’s the kicker — the scope of the investigation, what it could and couldn’t look at, was controlled by a subcommittee of KPMG’s own board. So the company being investigated was setting the rules for its own investigation. Now politicians are asking questions. Labor senator Deborah O’Neill and Greens senator Barbara Pocock both say this looks like a pattern — law firms being hired not to find the truth, but to produce a report that lets the client off the hook and shuts down criticism. Pocock didn’t mince words, saying it’s “no wonder” KPMG didn’t want to hand this report over to parliament. There’s also a bigger, industry-wide question here. Should law firms even be doing this kind of work? Under professional conduct rules, lawyers are supposed to serve justice, not just be a “mouthpiece” for whoever’s paying them. But when the client gets to decide what’s in scope and what’s off-limits, critics say that’s not really an investigation — it’s a PR exercise with legal letterhead. One former general counsel put it bluntly: this is an embarrassment for the legal profession, and she wants to know why the Law Society of NSW isn’t speaking up. For its part, the Law Society wouldn’t comment — though it did previously argue these reports should stay confidential under legal privilege. Allens, for the record, says it stands fully behind its work and rejects any suggestion it fell short of professional standards. But a forensic investigator from Kroll summed up the concern well: when law firms are boxed in by strict terms set by the client, you end up with what he called a “stage-managed process” — one that looks thorough on the surface, but only surfaces what the client is comfortable revealing. So the real story here isn’t just about KPMG. It’s about whether “independent investigations” run by law firms are actually independent at all — or just a more expensive way of saying “nothing to see here.”
And that’s it for this week.
And next week, I’ll be talking to Anthony Baker & Finbar O’Hanlon from IonVideo about how their AI driven technology company converts and assembles the data from traditional videos into hyper-personalised offerings. Much like Lego.
And I’ll be talking to CommSec’s equity market strategist James Gruber about the outlook for the Australian and US markets.
For the most exclusive access to leading economists and business leaders from around the world, subscribe to Talking Business from my website leongettler.com or whatever your favourite podcast platform is.
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