Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to indicate the Australian Greens’ support for this amendment. As I have indicated previously, we are not in support of this sell-off of Medibank Private. Also, we do not think it is the role of this parliament to pass legislation allowing for the government to make significant decisions that will have an impact on a particular industry and then for the government to be able to choose at what point in the electoral cycle it is most convenient for them to engage in the actual sale. Yet that is what we are seeing with this legislation.

The government announced their proposal to sell off Medibank Private. There was a negative response in the community from those people who had lived through the experience of the privatisation of a range of different institutions in Australia—be it the Commonwealth Bank and the impact of that on the closure of rural bank services or the sale of Telstra and the impact of that on telecommunications in regional areas. People have had a whole range of negative experiences of privatisation, and that was the response that this government got when it made the announcement that it intended to sell Medibank Private. Then, sometime down the track, we had an announcement to say, ‘Oh no, we’ll do that in 2008; we’ll do that after the election,’ the government having had a negative response from the community at the time when this sale was announced. So we are happy to support this amendment being put forward. As I have previously indicated, it is all in the context of not supporting the sell-off of Medibank Private but, nonetheless, we are prepared to support this amendment.