Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I refer the minister to her comments on ABC TV yesterday that:

At a point when they—

public servant superannuation liabilities—

are met, you might then consider what else you might do with it.

Given the Future Fund is well ahead of its financial targets, will the minister outline what other uses the government is considering for the fund? Is the minister considering investing in the communications infrastructure Australia so desperately needs, or will she just play politics with the Future Fund? Hasn’t she totally undermined the government’s wild claims that the Future Fund cannot be used for much-needed infrastructure investment?

Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Conroy for the question. It really is a bit rich to accuse this government of playing politics with the Future Fund when the best that the Labor Party can do is to raid the savings for future generations, dud the bush of the money set aside for the Communications Fund, roll back competition, abandon principles, promise anything—it is easy to make promises if you abandon principles—on the basis that Senator Conroy and Mr Rudd have not yet had an opportunity to sit down and work out the futility of the proposal that they are now expecting the public and other infrastructure providers to swallow.

The problem with the Labor Party’s approach to the Future Fund is that it has not ruled out going back to the honey pot again and again for anything at all that takes its fancy, even though the shadow Treasurer said on 12 separate occasions that the Future Fund should be locked up. It has come up with some vague description of hard infrastructure to describe what it would fund. Nobody knows what that would mean. We do know that the Labor Party will treat this as a slush fund to go back to again and again for unpaid promises and for any scheme that takes its fancy.

There is no doubt the unions are drawing up their wish lists as we speak for spending on pie-in-the-sky proposals. Careful economic management allowed us to eliminate Labor’s $96 billion debt to create the Future Fund in the first place and the Communications Fund to future-proof regional communities. Of course, that is not something the Labor Party cares about. It is interested only in some very short-term economic gains. Now, only a few months after completing the sale of Telstra, Labor has announced not only that it would accept the privatisation of Telstra but that it would hasten the sale of the remaining shares from the Future Fund in order to raid this fund and get its hands on the money. That is an indecent haste. Labor cannot deny that taking proceeds from the Future Fund will have a negative impact on both the budget and the Future Fund. If in fact the Labor Party thinks it can then invest in something that will provide a revenue stream, it is sadly mistaken. Attempting to argue that its proposal will have a revenue stream from which to reimburse the Future Fund is just voodoo economics and everybody knows that. If you take the revenue stream from the Future Fund, it will never grow and be able to meet its liabilities.

If Labor’s broadband proposal is an economic goldmine then surely private equity markets would be funding it. Why rob the Future Fund if the banks would fund it? The Future Fund was established by the government to fully meet its unfunded superannuation liabilities by 2020 and, if the Labor Party keep their fingers out of the till, maybe we will get there.

Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. I draw the minister’s attention to the fact that she did not answer the question. What did she mean when she said, ‘you might then consider what else you might do with it’? Doesn’t Senator Minchin’s comment in today’s Financial Review reinforce her own comments that the Future Fund will be able to be used for infrastructure spending into the future? Isn’t Labor’s plan a sensible response to her failure to ensure that Australians have the communications infrastructure they need for the 21st century?

Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Conroy, in his usual artless and graceless way, has completely and totally missed the point of comments. I know that he pores over every word and tries to draw distinctions between syllables, but the bitter truth of this is that the Labor Party’s proposal is to gut the future fundings to meet these liabilities. If they go on the way they are going, they are simply going to run not only telecommunications but the whole economy into the wall.