Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Telstra Corporation and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2021 and indicate at the outset that Labor supports this bill. I'd like to begin with a quote:

It is good to see that the National Party have extracted this deal—

What's happened to Senator McKenzie? She's disappeared—

The National Party has used this position of leverage to get both the money on the table and the legislation on the table to fix the problems. That is what the National Party does. We are few in number but we managed to extract a deal and I sit here today with my colleagues proud of what we have achieved.

Senators may wonder when this statement was made and by whom. It was made on 14 September 2005 during the second reading debate on the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill by the now Deputy Prime Minister. This was the last step in then Senator Barnaby Joyce's selling out to the Liberals and agreeing to the privatisation of Telstra as a vertical integrated monopoly, a process that began in 1996.

This was a dark day for infrastructure investment and a dark day for competition policy and common sense. It was a day when we were told that regulatory obligations imposed on Telstra would serve the public interest and deliver the service and infrastructure investment that Australians needed. As we now know, those assurances from then Senator Joyce turned out to be non-existent. Telstra is no longer a vertically integrated monopoly because, after a decade of dithering by the coalition, the Labor Party structurally separated it. We did so in the national interest and in the name of competition policy.

The bill currently before the Senate arises from Telstra, as a private entity, seeking to restructure its business to better align the management and operations of its assets with the T22 strategy. This time the restructuring is one that Telstra is pursuing of its own accord, rather than in response to government. Telstra has stated publicly its plan to restructure the company into separate legal entities. Those entities include Telstra Group, InfraCo, TowerCo and ServeCo. These entities will hold different classes of assets and operate at different layers of the network. The explanatory memorandum notes:

Telstra does not require Government approval to undertake the restructure. However, without legislative and regulatory change, a range of key obligations that currently apply to Telstra would become ineffective or cease to apply to the successor entities.

As such, my understanding is that, primarily, this bill seeks to address three key issues that arise from Telstra's proposed restructure.

The first is to repoint Telstra's specific obligations that would otherwise cease to apply to new Telstra entities and to the entities in the Telstra Group. Secondly, it will introduce a ministerial directions power which enables the minister of the day to direct demerged Telstra entities to fulfill their existing regulatory obligations or to assist in the delivery of the obligations of another Telstra entity. This can include cooperation between entities to fulfil regulatory obligations or to uphold obligations in the NBN-Telstra definitive agreements. Thirdly, the bill has been drafted to ensure that the facility's access framework has its integrated integrity upheld and that the restructuring does not inadvertently move assets outside the scope of the regime. Furthermore, the explanatory memorandum to the bill states:

The Bill has been developed on the principle of regulatory equivalence. That is, that the regulatory obligations that currently fall on Telstra should also fall on the entities in the new corporate group in approximately the same way. While Telstra is free to restructure its business as it sees fit, successive Parliaments have placed and maintained a range of obligations on that business, and it is important that these remain effective.

This is an appropriate principle which Labor supports. However, Labor does not interpret this to mean that equivalence is in a purely technical or legalistic sense but in a practical sense too. That is the lens we have put on the bill. Based on briefings Labor has received from the department of infrastructure and communications, and from Telstra, we are satisfied that the proposed measures in the bill give effect to regulatory equivalence. And, in circumstances where unforeseen issues could arise, the bill affords the minister the necessary direction and makes powers to deal with them. Clearly, a lot of technical consideration has been put into this bill, and Labor thanks those who have provided briefings.

It should also be noted that Telstra has been proactive in identifying employment related issues and bringing them to the attention of policymakers. Separate instruments in the Senate are dealing with the grandfathering of employment benefits for Telstra employees and, based on consultations with unions, Labor is satisfied that those issues are being dealt with adequately. As such, Labor will support the bill.

Talk about the structure of Telstra, the NBN and its regulatory obligations conjures up many memories. You would be hard pressed to find a group of people more unqualified on broadband, technology and the telecommunications policy than the current Morrison-Joyce Liberal-National coalition.

In the mid-1990s, the Liberal-National government began the process of privatising Telstra as a vertically integrated—