Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the government’s point of view on this matter of public importance and to support my colleagues Senator Ian Macdonald and Senator Brandis, who both gave fiery addresses.

This matter relates to the sale of Telstra. That is the essence of the debate here today. The sale of Telstra has been the most debated issue in this chamber for the past 10 years. No issue has absorbed the time and ire of the opposition more than the sale of Telstra. We have had three separate, full-on Senate inquiries. We have had weeks and weeks of debates with the three different sale allotments. And we have had four elections, with the policy of the opposition at each election being not to sell Telstra and with the government having a clear and definite policy to sell Telstra. The differences are stark. We have debated the issue ad infinitum in this chamber. The government is upholding its mandate to sell Telstra.

Here we are again today debating the sale of Telstra. We are debating the most muddled, confused and contradictory MPI on Telstra yet. That is some achievement, and it is led by none other than Senator Conroy. The MPI is full of policy backflips, and it is being led by the very man who is not against the sale of Telstra. He is leading an opposition policy that he does not himself believe in. Why do I say that? Because I have him on record. I can quote Senator Conroy on record from a television interview some time back. He said:

It makes no difference to the majority of Australians one way or the other about the ownership structure. What they care about is what’s the best way to get cheaper prices and better services.

It is quite well known publicly and privately that the instigator of this matter of public importance today is in favour of the privatisation of Telstra. At the very least, he is not against the privatisation of Telstra. But it gets more contradictory and more muddled than that. Let me look at point (c) of the matter of public importance. Talk about policy backflips. It reads:

... government imposed regulation threatens the company’s earning prospects.

That is straight out of the handbook of Sol Trujillo and their part of the board. That is exactly the complaint they have been railing against the government over in the last 12 months or more. Yet Sol Trujillo was the target of Senator Conroy’s own personal attacks. As the previous government speaker, Senator Brandis, rightly put it, Senator Conroy’s hallmark is exaggerated statements and personal attacks. They are a substitute for policy, study and substance.

Senator Conroy is on record as railing personally against the Telstra CEO, Sol Trujillo. One of the characteristics about Sol Trujillo that Senator Conroy was railing against was the fact that Sol Trujillo believed that there was too much regulation over Telstra and that that stifled it in the market. Now we have the Labor Party supporting that point of view. It now supports less regulation over Telstra. I am not sure if those opposite really believe that, but for the purposes of this MPI it is in there and we have to accept it as policy.

What will those on the other side abolish in regard to regulation? Is it the universal service obligation, which this government supports and backs and which this government has strengthened in its time in government? Is it the customer service guarantee? Is that too much regulation? I can tell senators opposite that Sol Trujillo and the other three amigos think it is. They think it is too tough. They would like to see it lifted. Is that what the Labor Party also supports? Is it the operational separation between the wholesale sector and the retail division? That is another regulation that the Telstra board was reluctant to adhere to.

The government introduced those regulations for a purpose. It was not to put yet another layer of red tape across this market. We would not want to do that with this or any other market. It was in fact to enhance competition. Let us not forget that Telstra—or Telecom, the previous incarnation—was a government monopoly. To give the other carriers a chance in the market, we had to introduce a certain amount of regulation so that the other carriers had access to the infrastructure of Telstra. There is a reason it is there, and it is for better and smoother competition. There is another reason we introduced elements such as the customer guarantee and the universal service obligation. That is to support the rural and regional areas of Australia so that they can have an equivalent standard of telecommunications to that of metropolitan areas.

I would have thought that the Labor Party would have supported that—and I actually thought they did support it. Thinking back over previous debates, I would have thought that you supported government regulation and intervention so as to equalise the rural and regional areas that, without regulation, would not receive a communication standard equivalent to that in metropolitan areas. It seems to me that you no longer do that. For the sake of political opportunism, you have done a backflip. You have become so inconsistent and so muddled on this issue that you now send a signal to the Australian people that they simply cannot trust you on policy. If this is the No. 1 policy you wish to debate in this chamber, it does not bode well for the rest of your policies.