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

They punted Mansfield because he was leaking to the Prime Minister. They punted him—that is what happened! It made the smooth management of the company impossible and forced Mr Mansfield’s resignation. Mr Mansfield’s own words—just so that you do not get collective amnesia over on the other side—were that ‘the bond of trust has been broken’. Yes: he broke it because he went off leaking to the Prime Minister.

The irresponsible nomination of Mr Cousins by the Howard government revives the prospect that these days will return to Telstra. Compounding the shambles that the T3 has become, the nomination of Mr Cousins also completely contradicts one of the government’s key rationales for the Telstra sale. The government has consistently told the Australian people that it was unsustainable for it to continue to own Telstra by virtue of the conflict that arose as a result of the government being both the owner and regulator of the company. The government told the voters that T3 would end this intolerable conflict. The nomination of Mr Cousins gives the lie to that argument. Instead of ending this so-called conflict, the government—and here is the real rort—just weeks before it flogs off its majority control, appoints Mr Cousins for a three-year term. Just when Telstra thought it was running free of government interference, on its own statements by the government, the cold dead hand of Prime Minister Howard appeared in the form of Mr Cousins and grabbed the company’s ankle.

No wonder the Telstra board recommended its shareholders vote against his nomination in their notice of annual general meeting. The nomination of Mr Cousins is the kind of behaviour characteristic of an arrogant government that has been in power for far too long—a government thinking only about its own political interests and not of the interests of those affected by its fits of pique.

The nomination of Mr Geoff Cousins shows that Prime Minister Howard has changed. There was a time when Prime Minister Howard would have been smart enough not to put his own political interests ahead of those of the Australian public. But not today. He is willing to ride roughshod over them simply to pursue a personal grudge.

This willingness to sacrifice current and prospective Telstra shareholders for the government’s political interests can be seen in the decision to dump billions of dollars worth of Telstra shares into the Future Fund. The Howard government made the political decision that it wanted to proceed with the sale of Telstra at any cost. It didn’t care whether to do this required holding a fire sale, or offering a whole suite of tricked-up incentives, or making the whole exercise a smoke and mirrors trick. It made an ideological decision to sell, and it wanted to get rid of the shares any way it could. That is where the Future Fund came in.

The government decided that, because there was insufficient demand in the market to allow it to sell its entire shareholding, it would dump the bulk of the shares into the Future Fund and claim that was the end of it. Of course transferring the ownership of the Commonwealth’s Telstra shares from the Commonwealth to the Future Fund—an investment fund wholly owned by the government—was always ridiculous.

However, the real economic incompetence comes from the fact that David Murray, the Chair of the Future Fund, has refused to allow the Future Fund to be overweight in Telstra shares. As such, the Future Fund has made it clear that it will sell down its interest in Telstra over the coming years—subject to the two-year escrow period. From the moment this shonky plan was concocted, the Labor Party was warning that it would be Telstra’s long-suffering shareholders that would pay the price for this decision. (Time expired)