Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise in this matter of public importance debate. Particularly after a question time that saw four Labor members excluded and 13 others warned, I am happy to join with my colleagues and debate this important issue. There are those on this side of the House who almost hanker for the days when the minister for health played the role of the enforcing bullyboy in this parliament. Now he has moved from that stage of his political career to a stage where we have seen him today, gibbering on in question time a bit like what we expect from the member for O’Connor, making no sense at all and gibbering on about socialists when he should be addressing the important issue of the sale of Medibank Private. But in his incomprehensible contribution today he did manage to say one thing that is important for the House and the Australian public to know. That is that the intention of this government remains to sell Medibank Private. No-one should be fooled about that; as well as the extreme industrial relations laws and other government proposals, the next election will be about whether or not the community wants Medibank Private sold.

It is interesting to go back just a few short months, to 26 April, when the minister for finance and the minister for health, full of swagger and arrogance and masters of the universe at that stage, were out there to tell us what was going to happen with Medibank Private. It was all full steam ahead then. These men were on a mission, and they knew exactly what they were doing. In the course of outlining their intentions for Medibank Private, they were telling us how quickly it was going to be sold. I directly quote the minister for finance, who said during this press conference where they were puffed up with how clever they were at selling Medibank Private:

... the legislation will be introduced into the budget session.

This was a press conference in April; they were going to introduce the legislation to sell Medibank Private in the budget session. The minister for finance, Senator Minchin, goes on:

We would hope to complete a sale in financial year 2006/07. We have not made a decision yet on the method of sale. Broadly speaking, the options open to us are a trade sale or a public offering.

So there they were in April, ready to sell. They were going to put the legislation through in the budget session, fully on notice that they might float it or they might go down a trade sale route. Of course this is a government that actually knew in April that it wanted to sell the rest of Telstra. That was not a mystery to the government; that is not something that has just come upon it in a blinding flash. This is a government that knew it wanted to sell Telstra and knew it wanted to sell Medibank Private, and it was full steam ahead. It was going to sell. Yet today we have got leaked out on the front page of the Fin Reviewthe cowardly way you get a story out: give it to one newspaper and let it float out into the ether—

See this speech in context