As the Telstra crisis unfolded, the Coalition fell victim to another communications failure

‘There is a growing frustration among some in the Coalition that, under Angus Taylor (centre) the opposition is spending too much time cleaning up its own errors.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP View image in fullscreen ‘There is a growing frustration among some in the Coalition that, under Angus Taylor (centre) the opposition is spending too much time cleaning up its own errors.’ Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP Analysis As the Telstra crisis unfolded, the Coalition fell victim to another communications failure Josh Butler He should be upping pressure on the government over the second major telco breakdown in 12 months, but Angus Taylor can’t stop scoring own goals Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast As the government was being questioned over the regulation of telcos and the latest massive Telstra outage, the opposition leader, Angus Taylor , was being asked about communications failures of a different kind: his own, and those of his ministerial team. Millions of phone connections around the country went out for hours on Wednesday. Trains ground to a halt, Eftpos transactions went blank, hundreds of triple zero calls failed and welfare checks were being urgently carried out. The bulk of the fault lies with Telstra. But there are important questions to answer about whether the critical telecommunications sector is being appropriately regulated, and whether the government has learned from last year’s devastating Optus outage and made the necessary changes. Taylor defends Sarah Henderson’s triple-zero calls amid questions about claimed Telstra-outage death in SA Read more All points on which the opposition could pursue the government. But at his press conference on Thursday, Taylor was instead forced to defend a growing list of gaffes made by his team: Sarah Henderson’s decision to “test” calling triple zero ; and his own invocation, with zero evidence, of the possibility of Chinese interference . Experts have, as of Thursday afternoon, no evidence of any such malicious activity by any foreign power. That maychange. But it does politicians no favours to air such serious allegations in a crisis while the facts are, at best, in dispute. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email While the communications minister, Anika Wells, rushed back from leave, and government figures from prime minister Anthony Albanese down gave regular updates through the media, Taylor and his team were struggling to stop tripping over their own feet. It has been a two-day play on why the Coalition – despite relentless media criticism of Labor for handing down an unpopular budget, and One Nation plateauing in the polls after its meteoric rise – is not just failing to make ground but is somehow still losing support. The first contribution from Taylor on the Telstra outage on Wednesday morning was to criticise the government for not “fronting up”, and to invoke the prospect of Chinese interference – a theo