Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you disagree with me, you clearly were not listening to what I was saying. Senator Wong has clearly plucked the appointment of Mr Cousins out of the air and given to him a corporate responsibility that I do not think anyone else in this country would have ever shared. Are Senator Wong and Senator Conroy really suggesting that Mr Cousins is going to have an impact on future earnings in his own right—an impact on future dividends in his own right? Is he going to effectively be running this company to the extent that it is such an issue?

The bottom line with this is that Mr Cousins will bring to this board the sort of qualifications that the Australian Labor Party, with its jobs for mates, most certainly did not ever bring. Let me very briefly go through the qualifications of Mr Cousins. The community will make up its own mind about Mr Cousins—and not by listening to the Australian Labor Party or some in Telstra management. When we look at what this man has done and whether he is likely to bring some skills to the job, I think that emphatically the Australian people will say yes.

Mr Cousins has very strong experience in marketing, advertising and telecommunications. I would have thought they were three great qualities in someone taking on the responsibility of a Telstra board member. For 20 years, Mr Cousins was a senior executive with Australia’s most powerful advertising agency, George Patterson. Surely, for a company that is going through what Telstra is going through at the moment, marketing and advertising skills and the ability to convince institutional and private investors—retail investors—of the bona fides of this company and the fact that it does have a plan for the future would be two of the qualities needed.

Surely some telecommunications skills would also be required. Mr Cousins has been a director of Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd and the Seven Network. Indeed, he has 26 years experience as a company director. The Telstra board has made its views known about Mr Cousins. The government has made its views known as well. The government is a majority shareholder. This is not some stack of the Telstra board. This is the government, as a shareholder with entitlement to appoint board members, appointing someone with the requisite skills to drive this company forward. Mr Cousins has the skills to drive the company forward. If you were to listen to the Australian Labor Party, you would think that the government had plucked people out of the air to drive the Telstra board for the next 10 years. We could have appointed five directors had we wanted to do so. We made the decision to appoint one—one with the requisite skills to do the job.

If I had 10 minutes I would happily go through the appointments by the Australian Labor Party at a state and federal level over the last three decades whereby the appointees had absolutely no skills for the boards and companies to which they were appointed. The bottom line is that Mr Cousins has the sorts of skills that Telstra requires. He has the sorts of skills that mum-and-dad investors in Telstra will be looking for for the future. (Time expired)