Optus is preparing to significantly expand its Australian workforce, with chief executive Stephen Rue confirming the carrier plans to grow its headcount from roughly 6,800 to as many as 7,500 employees over the next 12 months. The figure came out during a parliamentary committee inquiry into last September's triple zero network outage, where Rue was pressed to explain an apparent contradiction: how a company that recently cut between 200 and 300 positions could simultaneously claim it was investing in its people.
The answer, Rue told the inquiry, lies in the structure of those changes. The recent redundancies were not concentrated in any single division but spread across many parts of the business in smaller clusters. The net growth in headcount would come from three distinct sources: bringing offshore work back to Australia, buying back its retail store network, and targeted investment in functions Rue said were plainly "in need of attention", including risk management, security, and legal and compliance capabilities.
The scale of the insourcing challenge is considerable. Nokia currently employs around 3,000 staff at its Chennai facility to fulfil a contract covering Optus call centre and network operations. Optus had previously signalled it would repatriate roughly 300 of those roles to Australia, and Rue confirmed on Thursday that about 100 positions had already been moved, with the transition beginning in October and continuing through December. The remaining functions, he said, require careful planning before they can be safely relocated.
"This has to be obviously done carefully, because you've got to train people onshore, you've got to have your systems in place," Rue told the committee. He said Optus was still assessing how to responsibly complete the remainder of the transfer and could not yet give a firm completion date.
The insourcing push is being driven, at least in part, by the reputational and operational damage of the September outage, which left millions of Australians unable to reach emergency services for several hours. An internal review conducted by Dr Kerry Schott found the outage was compounded by a chain of communication failures inside the call centre. Staff in Chennai were not informed an outage had occurred and, when concerned members of the public rang in unable to reach triple zero, operators directed them to check their own devices rather than escalating the reports.
Schott told the inquiry that listening to recordings of those calls was "distressing". She described callers who had already experienced significant personal stress attempting to flag a serious public safety issue, only to be walked through routine technical troubleshooting.
"They had been through considerable personal distress and were basically doing a public service by ringing up to say what was wrong," Schott said, adding that she found it deeply uncomfortable to hear five separate callers treated this way during an active emergency.
In response, Optus has added automated monitoring to its interactive voice response system to instantly detect and escalate calls related to triple zero faults. The carrier has also introduced more detailed testing procedures designed to identify emergency call failures earlier. Whether those changes are sufficient is a question the inquiry is still examining.
The committee, chaired by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, has been pushing for broader accountability from Optus's Singapore-based parent company, Singtel. The inquiry sought the appearance of Singtel chief executive Yuen Kuan Moon and former Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly, who sits on Singtel's board. Both declined. Kelly was offered the option of appearing by video link but did not take it up. Singtel chairman John Arthur told the committee that Kelly's schedule of board meetings in London made attendance impossible, while adding that she "fully supports the work of this committee" and would provide written answers to questions on notice.
Hanson-Young also indicated the committee is attempting to recall the Australian Communications and Media Authority for further evidence, suggesting the inquiry's appetite for answers has not been satisfied by the hearings held so far.
The workforce expansion Rue described is a genuine signal that Optus is prepared to invest in domestic capability after years of offshoring critical functions. That is a reasonable response to a crisis that exposed the risks of outsourcing operations at the core of public safety infrastructure. The harder question, which the inquiry is still working through, is whether structural changes inside the company are enough on their own, or whether the regulatory framework governing Australia's telecommunications sector needs to be strengthened to ensure this kind of failure cannot recur. Both things can be true at once, and a clear-eyed answer will require engaging seriously with both.