Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am grateful to Senator Joyce for that very helpful lesson in procedure. If you have a legislative instrument which can be disallowed at any time within 15 sitting days that could be over a period of several months, depending on when the break was. Each time that happens it will put a spanner in the works in terms of allowing the structural separation of Telstra to progress. That is a real risk. That is a public policy imperative. As I said earlier, I think there are some coalition senators who, in their heart of hearts, acknowledge that the current vertical integration of Telstra as a telecommunications quasi-monopoly has been bad for consumers and bad for the development of telecommunications in this country. If we have this mechanism in place, however well intentioned it may be, it will end up slowing down the process significantly—to the extent that it could well become unworkable. For those reasons, I feel that I cannot support this series of amendments.