Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The Labor Party’s fault. Let’s be clear about this. Let’s be clear about who created the overhang. In the 1996 election, who was it who said, ‘We’ll sell a third’? It was the then opposition, the current government. They decided to sell a third. They created the position of the overhang. Then in 1998 they announced they were selling the rest. It was at that moment, when the government stated they were going to sell the rest, that the overhang was generated. It was not generated by the Labor Party, who had been in opposition at that stage for about three or four years. It was not the Labor Party. This mob created the overhang. This mob are responsible. By dumping their shares into the Future Fund, the government will effectively institutionalise a weak Telstra share price for the immediate future. Dumping their Telstra shares into the Future Fund will be a failure of policy— (Time expired)