Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is preparing to defend her leadership publicly after two high-profile disasters within 13 months, with Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young revealing the key questions the embattled chief executive must answer.
Bayer Rosmarin has presided over both one of the nation’s worst outages and one of the worst data breaches in recent history, heaping pressure on the leader of what is Australia’s second-largest telco. At 9am on Friday, the Senate will demand answers in a two-hour grilling to be chaired by Hanson-Young.
The public mood against Optus remains one of acute anger and a source, close to Optus not authorised to speak publicly, said that Bayer Rosmarin had spent much of the past week calling the telco’s small business customers to personally apologise for the outage.
Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin will front a public Senate committee hearing in Canberra on Friday morning.Credit: Michael Quelch
Executives at Optus are preparing for Bayer Rosmarin to be a political “punching bag”, the source said, with some of the telco’s PR team redeployed to help the executive prepare to answer questions about technical details of the outage and the telco’s decision to offer its customers 200 gigabytes of free data rather than monetary compensation.
Optus’ executives are also expecting a more personal line of questioning related to Bayer Rosmarin’s movements on Wednesday and her about her ongoing leadership of the company. They also say there is no evidence she is likely to step down from the role she has held since April 1, 2020.
Optus sources have also expressed frustration that Bayer Rosmarin’s communication with customers hasn’t matched her communication with employees, which they say has been impressive.
“We are preparing to fully co-operate with the Senate inquiry,” an Optus spokeswoman said when contacted for comment.
Hanson-Young will chair the Senate hearing, to be heard under the auspices of the Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications. It’s the first of a number of probes into the outage including post-incident reviews by both the Communications Department and communications watchdog, the Australian Communications Media Authority.