Paul Fletcher is a member of the Liberal Party and the Federal Member for Bradfield. He served as the Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts from May 2019 to December 2020, and stayed as Minister for Communications through to May 2022. Mr. Fletcher also served as Optus' Director of Corporate & Regulatory Affairs from March 2000 to January 2008. He now serves as the Manager of Opposition Business and is the Shadow Minister for Science, Arts, Government Services and the Digital Economy.
Accusation of Optus Cyber Hack Responsibility
In the aftermath of the Optus cyber hack, Labor's Federal Member for Wills and Chair of the Intelligence & Security Committee, Peter Khalil, referenced Mr. Fletcher's employment with Optus while criticising his government's decision making as an underlying cause of the data breach in an interview with Sky News:
"The previous government, the Liberal government, decided to exempt telecommunication companies from the security of critical infrastructure laws. They made that decision. It enabled this attack. Now Optus is responsible but of course, what, you know that we live in a very dangerous neighbourhood. We all agree on that and that decision - and of course the Minister for Communications was a former Optus executive, Paul Fletcher. So they left out the telco's because the telco's said 'Oh, we've got this, we can handle it," but of course that has meant that they have left, not only the door unlocked in this dangerous neighborhood, when there's a rise of cyber attacks and cyber criminals and so on. They've left it wide open, they've left the back door open and they've left the windows open."