One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce is calling for an investigation into whether China’s missile test this week is linked to the Telstra outage affecting phone services and critical infrastructure across Australia.
The country’s biggest telecommunications firm on Wednesday experienced network problems “affecting some mobile calls and data connections”.
The outage, which was 90 per cent restored by 10am AEST, affected millions of mobile customers and downed payment machines and banking services.
Train networks in the most populous states were also affected, with all regional services in Victoria down.
In a midmorning update, Telstra said the cause remained unknown.
One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has questioned whether China is behind the Telstra outage. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Dallinger
Mr Joyce, a long-time China hawk, said he hoped “it’s just a coincidence about the intercontinental ballistic missile that went into the Pacific”.
“I don’t want to be paranoid or a conspiracy theorist, but we know there is the capacity of China to affect that sort of software and that sort of network and I hope that that’s investigated and cleared as not part of the process,” he told Sky News.
Mr Joyce said the idea came to him while he was on an earlier phone call.
“And I just thought, ‘Well, that’s very coincidental’,” he said.
“We know that they have hacked into computers, we know that this is part of the raison d’etre of their process.
“I think it’s an issue that needs to be cleared up to make sure that it was not a particular process.”
Asked if he thought it could be “sinister”, Mr Joyce said it was “more a case of, ‘Yeah, we looked into it, we know where the problem lies’”.
“It wasn’t code that was sitting in the background that did this,” Mr Joyce said.
“It’s better to be cautious and to have things cleared up than to just dismiss it out of hand.”
He insisted he did not want to “startle” anyone, but “I do think a diligent process is to make sure that there’s nothing lead bullet in this”.
China has tested a nuclear capable missile in the South Pacific. Picture: People’s Liberation Army / Handout / NewsWire
China testing a nuclear-capable missile has rattled governments in the region and sparked widespread condemnation.
It was fired from a nuclear submarine lurking in the South China Sea, according to Chinese officials, and landed somewhere between Nauru and Fiji – thousands of kilometres from Australia’s coast.
However, Australian intelligence services have long warned of China’s threat to Australia’s critical infrastructure – power grids, hospitals, airports, banks and the cyber systems that underpin them all.
The national cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, last year warned Beijing’s cyber soldiers were “routinely” hunting “Australian government networks for cyber espionage purposes” and targeting critical infrastructure.
ASIO chief Mike Burgess has also stressed the need to be vigilant, saying in a speech last year that infamous Chinese state-backed hacking groups were targeting “telecommunication networks here in Australia too”.
“I do not think we – and I mean all of us – truly appreciate how disruptive, how devastating, this could be,” he said.
China has dismissed the warnings as “disinformation”.
