George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Minchin, Minister for Finance and Administration. I again refer the minister to the Prime Minister’s claims that the government does not want to dud existing Telstra shareholders. Is the minister aware of comments by the CEO of the Australian Shareholders Association, Mr Stuart Wilson, who has said that if the government dumps its Telstra shares into the Future Fund then:

... this will virtually guarantee that the share price will go sideways (at best) for years ...

How can the minister justify putting a ceiling on the Telstra share price when it has already collapsed from over $9 to $3.60 under the Howard government? What does the minister now have to say to the 1.6 million Telstra shareholders whose investment has already fallen by up to $5.40 per share only to see the Howard government going out of its way to continue their pain?

Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I said before, the reason the company is in this position of having 50 per cent of its shares owned by the government is the recalcitrance of those opposite, who have fought forever against freeing up this company from government ownership. Telstra is the great symbol of the wasted years of Labor’s opposition. They have wasted 10 years in opposition. All they can do on a policy front is oppose anything that the government proposes. The government has been committed to—and has won four elections on the back of—a platform of selling all the remaining government shares in Telstra, and that has been opposed by the Labor Party on every occasion all the way through.

To the extent that anyone can complain about the possibility of some share overhang, that is what you have as a result of the Labor Party refusing to agree in 1999 to the full sale of the Telstra shares. We should be in a position now where this company is entirely free of the government shareholdings so there is no share overhang. But it was the Labor Party in this place which refused to allow the government, the legislative authority, to sell all its remaining shares at that time. As a result taxpayers are $50 billion worse off.

George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. Isn’t columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz right when he says:

If the—

Telstra—

shares were parked in the Future Fund they would overhang the market for Telstra shares, imposing a ceiling of sorts on any upside.

Is the government so out of touch that the minister now wants to force Telstra’s 1.6 million shareholders, who have already suffered massive losses on their investment, to pay the price for its incompetent management of the sale of Telstra?

Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I should state for the record that we do bear very much in mind the issues facing the 1.6 million shareholders, many of whom happen to be Labor Party members, ironically. The hypocrisy knows no bounds: they oppose the sale but then they buy the shares. They are important to us, and that is why, in the interest of their part-ownership of this company, we want to get the government out of the ownership of this company. It is a ridiculous situation to have half of this company owned by the government. Those shareholders will be much better off when all those shares are floated. We hope to be in a position to make a full retail offer, but we have not yet made a decision. So the question is entirely hypothetical.