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

I hope my time was held over while that little rant took place to try to cover his embarrassment. This is the nub, joking aside—although I do accept Senator McGauran’s point about humour. There is a lot of humour in this debate at the moment. I accept that.

As such, today Telstra Wholesale does not control the prices it sells at, does not have sales staff who manage customer relationships and does not have the ability to negotiate new contracts. This is the nub of the issue. All of these critical business functions are now performed from head office, not from Telstra Wholesale. Of course, as a result of the government’s flawed structure for its operational separation regime, Telstra has an incentive to do this. Gutting Telstra Wholesale does not hurt the company, because under the government’s model Telstra’s retail arm acquires its services from the network arm, not from the wholesale arm, which all of the other competitors have to access.

Even worse, this structural flaw is compounded by virtue of the sidelining of the ACCC from the process. This is what you are voting for. Lib or ‘Rat Nat’, it does not matter. You are voting to take the ACCC out of the equation. When Telstra does abuse its vertically integrated structure anticompetitively, the ACCC will not be able to do anything about it. The ACCC has no powers to investigate breaches of the operational separation regime and would be precluded from taking enforcement action with respect to breaches until the minister approved a rectification plan. This is taking the role of the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts a long, long way. The way in which this legislation sidelines the ACCC in favour of direct ministerial involvement poses a real risk that the operation of the regime will become unacceptably politicised. I know that when you are in government, whether you are a member of the National Party, a Rat Nat or a Lib, there is no such thing as—