Dr Mike Kelly MP, Member for Eden-Monaro

“I want to pay special tribute to the regional general manager for Telstra, Chris Taylor, and his team. They have been incredible.

“We are in touch on an hourly basis…and his teams have been stretched to the limit. Their infrastructure has been smashed; their redundancy systems tested like never before, and damaged because of the scope of what has happened across the landscape.

“He has done a tremendous job, and I really want to thank him and his teams who have been out there, at personal risk, from the very first day of the loss of the telephone exchange in Tumut—for other reasons, but it just snowballed from there. There are a lot of lessons to take away from that.”