Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Most of us in politics spend a lot of time and energy seeking win-win situations. Sadly, all too often we are not successful in that and occasionally we manage win-lose situations and, unfortunately, every now and then we end up with lose-lose situations. You may recall that the Leader of the Opposition described the outcome of the government’s latest Telstra privatisation plan as a lose-lose situation.

As can sometimes be the case, the Leader of the Opposition was being a little bit generous in describing the government’s handling of the Telstra privatisation as lose-lose because in fact it is lose-lose-lose-lose. The Howard government is on the verge of a unique political achievement—a four-loss register: lose-lose-lose-lose. The source of this achievement, of course, is John Howard’s you-beaut Telstra share sale scheme with the aid of his own person salesman, Slick Nick, the man with the gold-plated cufflinks, the designer glasses, the shiny patent leather shoes and those beautiful clipped consonants and rounded vowels. Have you ever noticed them? Probably you do not know him; I am not sure whether you know him well. But he is a guy who has all the attributes required for the job: the gold-plated cufflinks and the rounded vowels.

In John Howard’s you-beaut Telstra sale, everyone is a loser. This is a unique political achievement—four losses: everyone is a loser. Let us start with the hundreds of thousands of existing Telstra shareholders, many of whom purchased their Telstra shares for $7.40 in T2, some of them who even purchased Telstra shares at a higher price subsequently. How are they faring? They are already losing because the government’s plans are already putting substantial downward pressure on the share price and have been doing so for several months. The institutions, the institutional investors, are not silly. They could see this coming. They have been selling their Telstra shareholdings for months because they plan to buy back in, later down the track, to T3 at a lower price. Already Telstra shareholders are suffering a depressed price as a result of John Howard selling Telstra shares at a highly inappropriate time into an already depressed market.

Slick Nick says Telstra shares are doing fine. In the Senate yesterday he said, ‘Don’t worry. There’s no problem because, if they haven’t sold those shares, they haven’t made a loss. If you bought a share at $7.40 six or seven years ago and you have not sold it, and it is now only worth $3.50, it does not matter—you are not out of pocket. You have not made a loss. Everything is fine.’

Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, I am sure you would be aware that Terry McCrann is not a Labor acolyte. Terry McCrann is not renowned for pulling his punches where Labor is concerned. He is one of Australia’s premier business commentators, if not the premier business commentator. I draw to your attention some of his observations about Slick Nick in this morning’s Telegraph and Herald Sun—

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