Nick Champion (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Labor supports the Foreign Investment Reform (Protecting Australia's National Security) Bill 2020. I think the member for Rankin is going to speak in support of his amendments. My main issue with this whole area, when we're looking at foreign investment proposals, is that we're talking very much of prospective foreign investment proposals. My concern is that, over the last 30 years, we've seen a whole range of Australian assets privatised—most recently, the port of Darwin, which I've had something to say about in the press. I've called for that sale to be resolved by nationalisation. I think that the port of Darwin should be in the hands of the Australian government. I think that's a sensible thing to do because it protects our sovereign interests. But, of course, over the last few decades, there's been an orgy of privatisation and an orgy of outsourcing of state government assets.

In South Australia, we've seen the privatisation of electricity. We've seen the lease of assets which should be held in government hands, notably the Electricity Trust of South Australia. What we saw there was, first of all, not just privatisation but also the sin of disaggregation, where they split up what was essentially a unit for the creation and distribution of electricity generation—poles and wires. They split it up and sold it off bit by bit because they thought that that would be the way they'd make the most money. In the process of disaggregating it, they wrecked, in my opinion, a system that produced low-cost energy for South Australia. They sold it off bit by bit. The disaggregation is a problem, but the sale itself was a problem.

When it was sold, it was in a very benign international environment. A company from Hong Kong, CK Infrastructure Holdings, bought, in particular, the poles and wires part of the electricity distribution network in South Australia. We now have the situation where Hong Kong is effectively under the control of the People's Republic of China and the companies in that jurisdiction are also under the control of that government. That is undoubtedly a question for that country, but there is the issue that the South Australian electricity network has been sold to a company which has been excluded from participating in the sale and privatisation of other energy assets in this country, notably, the privatisations in New South Wales. So we have the situation where, because a privatisation occurred 30 years ago now, somehow, the ownership arrangements which were allowed at that time are allowed to remain in force. I don't think that's a sensible thing for this country to do. It's certainly not a sensible thing for South Australia.

The privatisation of those assets has been a disaster for other reasons—for economic reasons. A 99-year lease was a particularly poor way of structuring the sale. It was sold at a bargain basement price—many of these electricity assets are sold for bargain basement prices. But it's now also an issue, I think, of national security. These very important assets—the Port of Darwin and, in this case, the electricity grid of South Australia; poles and wires are the spine and architecture of our electricity system in South Australia—are now owned by a foreign company, and one within a very different international environment from which we had when the grid was sold in the 1990s.

When we're looking at these bills, we actually need to have a bit of a think. One of Labor's criticisms is that they've been rushed. We need to have a very close look at what has been sold over the last three decades, because you can't do much without electricity. It's pretty critical to modern life. In my mind it would be best if these assets were held in public hands, particularly at the moment, and that those assets, if not in public hands, were at least in the hands of Australian investors and Australian companies.

With that, I commend the bill to the House.

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