Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Member for New England. Haven’t you noticed that telecommunications have got much better in this country since that was done? Of course, you would want to stay in the past. Now I have been thrown off track. Two billion dollars was set aside from the sale of Telstra to be used as a perpetual fund to improve telecommunications progressively in rural and regional Australia. I unashamedly and proudly stand here tonight as a representative from regional Australia, and I am being forced to defend the Labor Party’s decision to effectively transfer this money back into metropolitan Australia. How dare they do that. How dare they put that to the parliament. How dare they treat rural and regional residents in such a way. How they propose to do it is in fact to take the money out of the Communications Fund and basically spend it on broadband infrastructure in metropolitan Australia, an area where services are already being provided at no cost to the government, through private providers. It just does not make sense. It concerns me very much that rural and regional Australia is being treated in this way.

Why does it surprise me that the Labor Party would be proposing to steal money out of this fund, to steal thousands of millions of dollars? I remember, and the defence community continues to remind me, that initially defence superannuation was fully funded. That means that money was put aside every year to pay the entitlements of defence members when they fell due. So what happened in the Whitlam years? Mr Whitlam, his cabinet and his Labor government raided the superannuation fund of Defence Force members. What did they do? They spent the lot. Here we are again, 30 years later, with a communications fund that is locked up for the purpose of providing faster, more appropriate services to rural and regional Australia. What are Labor up to? They are raiding the fund. That should not be allowed to happen. Surely my colleagues on the other side—like the member for Lowe—are sensible enough to understand that this is wrong. It is not what should be done.

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