Triple Zero Australia: Can we still trust the emergency hotline after recent failures?

There’s a good reason “000” was chosen as Australia’s emergency number. It was, at least in part, because zero was closest to the finger stall on rotary-dial phones, making it easy to dial in the dark or in smoke.

That was more than 50 years ago, in 1961. Before then, Australia had no national emergency number. Police, fire, and ambulance services each had their own local numbers scattered across the country.

Now, Triple Zero is Australia’s primary national emergency telephone number, but multiple failures – and three deaths linked to last month’s Optus outage – have led to an uncomfortable question: can Australians still trust the three digits they’ve been taught to dial since childhood?

Most Australians know to dial 000 in an emergency, but few understand what happens next. The syst