Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It may be that you have the opportunity to correct that later, Senator Ferris. But it is good to see the four of them here together and being solid amongst each other. I suppose for all of us the pilgrimage to get to Canberra is one which sometimes has a lot of very difficult paths. The thing is that, when you look at the right-wing Liberals that have been controlling the Commonwealth government for the last 10 years, you see that they now have the opportunity that they have always been prevented from being able to acquire—that is, complete control of the Senate, which they have had from last year.

We have seen the government’s ideological obsessions being put into legislation in the last 12 months, with not only Welfare to Work but also Work Choices. And, finally, we now have the Telstra sale. Mr Deputy President, all those men and women from the right wing of the Liberal Party, who came here with ideas and imbued with some zeal for their causes, have now become those accomplished fanatics that we know will deliver the opposition power at the next federal election.

We know, with the situation with T3 and T2 and the government’s involvement in the shameful exercise of selling Telstra, that there was a full week of dithering by the Commonwealth government on whether or not it was going to go down the path that it finally did. Mr Deputy President, you may recall that, on the afternoon of the day of the announcement by the Prime Minister that the government was going to proceed down this path, there was certainly an indication that there was going to be no announcement made on the future of Telstra. But later, towards that Friday afternoon, the Prime Minister came out and did make the announcement that cabinet had finally, after a week of dithering, made a decision on how to proceed.

You and I know, Mr Deputy President, that the T3 shares will become dogs of shares. We already know that the government has no idea about how to proceed with the sale of this iconic Australian structure. Part of it is going to be put out in shares at some point; and another 30 per cent, I think it is, is to go into the Future Fund. Senator Minchin has been walking the streets of what I think is called the ‘windy city’, Chicago, trying to interest investors in the sale of Telstra, but he has been rebuffed. He has gone to San Francisco trying to do the same thing and he has been rebuffed. Even Senator Coonan has even been able to get into the act—wandering around the streets of Sydney and Melbourne talking to investors there—and she has been rebuffed as well.

Everybody who has taken an interest in the potential sale of this Australian icon knows that the government do not have a flaming clue as to how to proceed. We know, if we proceed down the path that they are putting forward, that men and women who attempt to invest in the T3 structure will lose their money, as they have before. And as to Sol Trujillo and his gang, how will those three amigos—let alone the four that are still left in the Senate chamber—propose, in a situation where we have worsening communications infrastructure in this country, to make all these effective changes?

One thing Mr Trujillo wants to do by the end of 2011 is shed 12,000 jobs in Telstra. He wants to have a favourable regulatory environment, which is what the whole debate between the government and Telstra is about. Mr Trujillo wants these affectations to occur so that the government can try to buy its way out of the problem it has got itself into. If I had more time I could highlight the difficulties that Mr Paul Neville has clearly highlighted to the government in relation to regional Australia. But this is where we are up to at this stage, Mr Deputy President: the fanatics have taken over the Commonwealth government—(Time expired)

Question agreed to.