Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

A very significant issue of policy has just been put on the record in this House by a very senior member of the opposition: ‘Commonwealth public servants don’t count. Public servants are not entitled to a guarantee of the superannuation to which they are appropriately entitled.’ And this comes from the mouth of one of the people who have lectured us about redundancy and entitlements. The member for Hotham has just said it plans to diminish the Future Fund by extracting shares, now the property of the managers of the Future Fund. They say it is more important to achieve some political gain of their impression—I think they are wrong—with an opportunity that goes from the ability to do business at the higher speed, which is to be applauded, to the downloading of movies. They say it does not matter whether the money will be there to pay the people who are totally dependent on this Future Fund and are so important to our nation today in the defence forces and the Federal Police and of course the large number of public servants of long service who do not come under modern contributory arrangements. That is what he said.

Consult the Hansard and you will see that the member for Hotham, on behalf of the opposition, said it is only going to Commonwealth public servants. I am pleased to say it is—that was the purpose, because we are going to see a huge demographic change. There is a view that the poor old taxpayer will have to stump up for them in another 20 years time. Who says? The taxpayer may be confronted with an offer from the government at that time saying: ‘We are not going to increase your taxes by X per cent. We are just going to put those public servants on the pension.’ To insulate those public servants and their entitlements, we have put the Future Fund in place, and they will be the losers if one dollar is extracted from it for other purposes.

But what has the previous speaker, the member for Hotham, just told us? It will be back to the future—suddenly the government is going to buy back into telecommunications and become the owner of a network. It is interesting to note that both the commercial independent parties fighting over the right to spend $4 billion of their shareholders’ money say that it will only address 72 per cent of the people in the network. Somehow or other a miracle is going to happen and the government will manage to deliver, for the same money, to 98 per cent! But above all—won’t it be nice?—there was not a word about the recurrent costs of this investment. Who is going to look after it? Who is going to get paid to do that? Or are we going to go back to the future and get another 20,000 public servants who will all be members of the union? That is about the only repository of membership the trade union has left—public servants. And they of course will all be up for their $5 levy to guarantee the re-election of a future Labor government.

So that is what we are being told—they are going to take $4 billion of taxpayers’ money and go and fight with two consortiums who are both fighting over the same bit of territory. What is the $2 billion being put into reserve for, to guarantee protection from the avariciousness of future treasurers, be they Liberal or Labor? What is the purpose of it? To use the words of the member for Hotham, to address market failure. In a commercial environment, government must always assume the responsibility of delivering balance by using some taxpayers’ money to address areas of market failure, because we as Australians believe in egalitarianism. We believe that the person most remote from where we stand today in the centre of government should have access to, particularly, the same communications services—probably above all else.

I am quite interested in this back to the future issue, because I have been around this place for quite a bit of time. I remember when the government owned Telecom, and I remember having 160 outstanding applications in one shire, the Shire of Denmark—I’ll name it—from people waiting to get an ordinary telephone connected. I remember fighting tooth and nail to try and reduce in the early 1980s the $6,000 the old-fashioned ‘government, we love you’ Telecom would charge to run a single wire up from the road to the household of a farming property. I well remember the fellow that rang me once and said: ‘Wilson, you can’t sell Telstra. The service is not as good as in the old days.’ I said, ‘Yeah, and I remember what sort of service you got when I first came, because I helped you get your first telephone.’ He did not have any complaints because he did not have a telephone. I always think it is a bit humorous when people complain over the internet to me about the standard of their internet service. I remember when that was a dream beyond anything, and that was when the government ran the shop.

So what are we talking about? A sensible approach. Let the private sector fight over it. I understand that Telstra has its nose out of joint. I am somewhat supportive of some of Telstra’s claims. I think they do have a responsibility to their shareholders and I think, when they sort out a few things, their 3G network, Next G, will be a very significant service across Australia. We have the right as the licensing authority to make sure they meet the commitments they made to the public.

But we do not need to go back to the future and invest $4 billion of taxpayers’ money, stealing half of it from the defence forces and the other half from officers’ superannuation, because we need every cent of it. Something like $140 billion is the liability that is going to arise. There are probably people working in this parliament who are dependent on that money. Do not ever think—I repeat, do not ever think—that without that money a future government will necessarily stand by those people. Do not ever think that. You, Mr Deputy Speaker, I and some other people sitting in this room have been around too long to believe that idea, other than with a guarantee. So do not touch it, because it would be a very foolish thing to do.

We have seen a senior shadow minister stand up in this place and say that public servants do not count, that this money is only for public servants. I hope a few public servants read this copy of Hansard because that is what was said and that was the reason given. ‘Give the children the opportunity to download movies now and someone else can worry about whether people in the defence forces et cetera get their proper superannuation entitlement.’

I have looked at the pious opposition amendment. There again we find the reference that they are going to fix 98 per cent of the population, when the private sector says that $4 billion will look after only 72 per cent. We want to protect these funds now. It is suggested that somewhere between $100 million and $150 million per annum will accumulate as profits from this fund—a fairly significant amount of money. I note the member for Hotham wanted to tell us that people will want to be connected to the satellite. That service is as fast as you would want today. You can go to various providers of satellite services and tell them what speed you want. You do not have to wait for high-speed broadband, fibre to the node or anything else. There is a problem in that: when you get to very high speeds, companies want to charge you more. Even that has become competitive.

If in the process you take VOIP—in other words, you connect your telephone to the same system—you no longer pay $40 a month for a telephone connection. When you put all those figures together, you can get well up into the hundreds out of a satellite. The member for Hotham said that that might cost somebody a $1,000 connection fee. The current arrangements still provide $2,750 of capital investment for the installation. The reality is that we get a situation where there is a direct subsidy. Let me say, to be fair, I think Telstra ran around and got too much of the HiBIS money to upgrade their exchanges with which, unfortunately—one starts talking about the various technical issues—ADSL travels only five kilometres of wire. That is not five kilometres of radius; that is five kilometres of wire. As a wire culture, Telstra encouraged people to form consortiums. They took the $1,000, or whatever it was, available under HiBIS and they aggregated it for an exchange upgrade. In my mind, they did not sufficiently vigorously market satellite for individual homesteads which are all, collectively, both five kilometres radius and more than five kilometres away from a central exchange. I have told them that.

I have told them they should take back, at their own cost, all the dodgy handsets that they let people buy without making sure that they were adequate for the outer regions. They now have a blue tick system. It is a bit late but in that process I have written to them and said that they should make an open offer. They all went for the kids’ handsets, all the nice little flip-flop ones, instead of getting a more suitable tradesman’s set, as one brand calls them. They did not get the tradesman’s set; rather they went for the others on the understanding that this unit would do what the CDMA unit they had traded in, got rid of or junked had done.

Telstra has a responsibility, as does anyone else who marketed those handsets—Crazy John—to take them back and give people the right one, just as you would expect had you bought a deficient item from another retailer. I think that would have a significant effect. I also point out that this much criticised minister has said on television, it is my personal observation, that we, using the licensing power, will insist that there be an appropriate service before CDMA is turned off. That did not happen when the analog service was turned off—it was just turned off. I well remember it. There was no such service with the digital changeover. The decision was made for the right reasons—because analog uses up too much of the spectrum—but it was a bad decision because the new service did not stand up. Then when we came to office Telstra found it appropriate to discover CDMA. Over time that has become a very good service. I always make sure, when meeting with my constituents, that I leave my phone turned on in the hope that it rings. It might be embarrassing but I say, ‘I thought this thing didn’t work in your town’—just for a bit of fun. The reality is that it has become a very good service and, what is more, it is time the new service was demonstrated to meet that requirement.

This is a universal service. It will work as well for my constituents in St Georges Terrace or for people in capital cities around Australia as it will for people on farming properties. That is what we expect. If you buy the appropriate plug and put it into your desktop computer, it will give you high-speed broadband. That is a development happening in the private sector. I am sympathetic to Telstra—that it is doing all that and is being treated as the bad boy. All strength to their arm if they want to give us a clip around the ear because they are a commercial body and are entitled to do so. And the member for Hotham stands up and says, ‘We’re going to steal $4 billion from the superannuation of public servants and we’re going to take this $2 billion so we can spend it now but we will have no proceeds in future for meeting areas of market failure, and we’re going to start our own little business.’ Not one word has been said in this place—and there is an opportunity for speakers to do so—about recurrent costs. Who is going to own it? Who is going to manage it and are those people going to be paid workers, who will, of course, all join the telecommunications union and be subject to the same sorts of levies that have become fundamental to the electoral returns of the Labor Party?

I do not think for a minute that this $4 billion has been identified or its expenditure proposed out of the goodness of the heart of the Labor Party. What a nice little investment; all those extra government workers to prop up their election funding! I also see the irony of the situation of the member for Hotham criticising the sale of Telstra. In any commercial sense, Telstra was the only surviving commercial asset of the Australian parliament or government on the day that we won the election and it was mortgaged to the extent of $96 billion. If this parliament was subject to the normal rules of commerce it would have been an issue, as it properly was, of an election where we went to the people and said, ‘If you re-elect us we are going to start selling Telstra.’ That stands in stark contrast to what one Paul Keating did, as I recollect, when he signed a letter to the Commonwealth Bank officers union promising before the election they would never sell the other half of the Commonwealth Bank—the 51 per cent, to be exact—and no sooner did they get re-elected in a surprise result than they announced they would sell it. We told people we were going to do it. But had we been a proper commercial entity the bank manager would have told us to sell it because we were overextended in debt. What had been done under the Hawke-Keating government with the other assets—with TAA, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory, Qantas in its revised form, the Commonwealth Bank, as I just mentioned? Each and every one of them was sold and, as is proposed with the Future Fund, the money was spent. It was not used to pay off debt. While all those proceeds were being disposed of, the debt of this parliament went up from $16 billion to $96 billion in five years.

There is the situation: it is a proposal that has no business planning, and you are just going to spend the money. You are going to do for 98 per cent what the private sector says it can only do for 72 per cent—and, of course, there is no money for the two per cent. There is no reserve fund for addressing market failure, which is the one and only responsibility of government. Of course we should do that. We have some opportunity to do it, as demonstrated with CDMA through the licensing, but I think that is a secondary choice. If you want to privatise things you then identify areas of market failure. We are putting in a fund and we are now guaranteeing it in law, so in the future, before you get your sticky fingers as a government on that money, you will have to pass laws in both houses of parliament. If the election was won by Labor they would have a majority in this place but they would have a much tougher job in the Senate—and thank goodness for that.

My people want this protection, they want it guaranteed, and so do the public servants. Every public servant in the defence forces and in the Federal Police and those others I mentioned can sleep well at night while the Liberal coalition stays in office, because we have guaranteed their retirement funds. They must start to lose a bit of sleep on the announcement made today that they do not count, that there are other political imperatives that accede on that occasion. (Time expired)

See this speech in context