Barnaby Joyce's Chinese conspiracy theory was irresponsible, and everyone failed to tackle it

Barnaby Joyce’s unfounded speculation the Telstra outage being caused by malicious Chinese interference was as irresponsible as it was predictable.

Perhaps the one useful aspect of his was that they exposed that Telstra isn’t the only network with faulty nodes. Australia’s media and political systems have also malfunctioned in the last day and a half.

Hours before a Telstra boss stated unequivocally that “this was not the result of a cyber incident”, the One Nation member for New England fronted a midday interview on Sky News Australia in which he volunteered the following quote:

I hope it’s just a coincidence 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 for China to affect that sort of software and that sort of network.

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