Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight because I believe we absolutely should be insisting on these amendments. We stood here in this Senate this afternoon and we agreed to these amendments because they were right, they were proper and they were good for rural and regional Australia. I have not changed my mind in the last few hours. The same reasons that I agreed with those amendments a few hours ago still exist. Absolutely nothing has changed—not one single thing.

Let us have a little look at why the Communications Fund was set up. The Communications Fund was set up because we need to protect rural and regional Australia—it is as simple as that. We went through a whole process of looking at the sale of Telstra, and we here in the Nationals made sure that rural and regional Australia would be protected. There is absolutely no moving away from that. We did it because it was the right and proper thing to do. We knew back then, in 2005, when the Communications Fund was set up, that if we did not move to put that protection in place, rural and regional Australians would miss out on equity in telecommunications.

Why did we do it? We did it because of the sale of Telstra. We had to be absolutely sure that there was a mechanism in place to provide funding in perpetuity to future proof rural and regional Australia, and that is what we did. And we did it in good faith and we did it with the trust of people in rural Australia. As Senator Joyce, my good colleague, said earlier, it is about trust. They trusted us and they said, ‘You go and proceed with the sale of Telstra but we know that the Communications Fund is in place to look after us.’ And why now, just a few years down the track, should we be moving away from that position? We should not be. We should not be moving one step away from that position. Communications in rural and regional Australia is absolutely a priority for us—absolutely. To sit here now, a few hours after we have agreed to the amendment not to move the Communications Fund funding to the Building Australia Fund—