Alan Ferguson (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Leader of the Government in the Senate and Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin. Will the minister inform the Senate of the benefits to Australia from the sale of Telstra and the establishment of the Future Fund? Further, will the minister inform the Senate of what impediments the Telstra privatisation faced? Finally, will the minister also outline to the Senate the dangers associated with raiding the Future Fund to pay for election promises?

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

I thank Senator Ferguson for a very appropriate, timely and good question. Last year the government achieved the historic full privatisation of Telstra, after a decade of arguing the case for this momentous achievement of ours. The sale, along with our strong budget surpluses, has allowed us to eliminate Labor’s $96 billion in debt and create the Future Fund to provide fully for the government’s unfunded superannuation liabilities.

Despite the clear benefits to Telstra, to consumers and to taxpayers from the sale of Telstra, the Labor Party have wasted a decade in ideological opposition to this sale. On a daily basis we heard from the Labor Party about all the gloom and doom that would beset the country if Telstra were sold. Following the success of T3 in November last year, Labor made it clear that they would oppose any further selldown of Telstra shares transferred to the Future Fund. On 20 November last year, finance spokesman Mr Tanner said that a Labor government:

... will not sell any more Government-owned Telstra shares, retaining the current stake in the company and providing certainty to shareholders.

All that has gone by the board. Today we saw one of the great policy roll-backs of all time from the Labor Party. Now, within just six months of an election, they have announced not only that they accept the full privatisation of Telstra but that apparently they are going to hasten the sale of the remaining shares by the Future Fund in order to raid the fund and get their hands on the money. So all that ideological opposition to selling Telstra lasted right up until the point where they decided that they needed to get their hands on the cash.

We hear on the grapevine that there are still some ideologues in the caucus who argued strongly against this backflip. I applaud them for at least being consistent. The rest of you have caved in to Mr Tanner and Mr Rudd. We did not see Senator Conroy making the announcement. He was gazumped by Mr Tanner and Mr Rudd. The big backflip represents a reckless and irresponsible raid on the Future Fund, which was established to help save $7 billion a year by 2020 to spend on the problem of an ageing population that this country faces. Labor’s approach is to raid the fund, spend the money here and now, and say: ‘To heck with the future!’

What are they spending the money on? A government owned and operated broadband network. In other words, they are going to support the privatisation of Telstra in order to nationalise broadband provision. That completely cuts across the existing private sector proposals, including Telstra’s fibre to the node and the G9 broadband network. So, apparently, they have no faith in the private sector’s capacity to deliver broadband to this country. They think they can just blunder in and do what the private sector apparently cannot do.

The announcement today indicates that, regrettably, Labor appears to be back in the business of running commercial operations. The policy today involves putting no less than $4.7 billion of taxpayers’ money at risk in a commercial venture. We have seen state Labor governments all over this country showing that they cannot run rail. We hear that the New South Wales rail system is the worst in the world. They cannot run electricity, they cannot deliver water infrastructure and they cannot deliver a project like the cross-city tunnel, but the federal Labor Party is going to spend $4.7 billion of taxpayers’ money running a broadband network. Labor’s massive backflip on the sale of Telstra indicates that the Labor Party has no principle so great that it cannot be jettisoned in the name of a quick grab for cash and that its financial policy is to raid the money set aside for the future. Labor has not moved at all from its dangerous, interventionist tendencies of the past.