Mr ANDREW(6.42 p.m.) —I welcome the opportunity to participate in this Telstra debate, and I particularly welcome the opportunity to follow my friend the member for Bruce (Mr Griffin), whose concluding point in the debate was that in some strange way rural and regional Australia would be disadvantaged by this legislative move. That is an extraordinary remark to be made by a member of the opposition. It is an extraordinary remark to be made simply because the representatives of rural and regional Australia are here on this side of the parliament. It is the representatives of rural and regional Australia that are backing this sale.

I remind both the parliamentary secretary and the member for Bruce that it is the National Farmers Federation, the group that represent regional and rural Australia, who have said, `This is the right course for us to take.' I stand here as the representative of a regional seat, and I stand here as a representative of a seat—as, indeed, the Deputy Speaker does—that is dependent on the community service obligations in order to have its communication needs met. I would not tolerate this piece of legislation if it disadvantaged my constituents.

If that were not of itself a persuasive argument, given that I am joined in this debate by the National Party as well, let me say this to the opposition: the minister responsible for this piece of legislation represents a rural and regional seat himself. He has no desire to see the communication facilities available to his constituents reduced in any way at all. I am very pleased that the minister is in the chamber. The minister is the one whose electoral responsibility includes King Island—

Mr Warwick Smith —And Flinders.

Mr ANDREW —And Flinders Island. There is a circumstance where clearly there would be a communication disadvantage if the community service obligations were not being met. The legislation obliges Telstra to continue with its present community service obligations. Were that not the case, I would not want to know it. Other regional members would not want to know it, the National Party would not want to know it, the National Farmers Federation would not want to know it and the minister would not want to be identified with it.

After listening to this debate, one could be forgiven for thinking that the government was standing here proposing the sale of Telstra. I must be fair to the member for Bruce. He was very objective in his analysis and referred to the partial sale of Telstra. But not all of his colleagues have been as honourable in their participation in the debate. We are talking about the partial sale of a government asset. We are talking about a sale that will limit individual foreign ownership to 1.667 per cent—that is, five per cent of the non-Commonwealth equity in Telstra.

Criticism is coming from people who have themselves not only proposed but also executed the sale of other major Commonwealth assets, such as the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and the Federal Airports Corporation. Those sales, not conditional on a partial sale, were made by the now opposition when in government without any reference to the people.

The member for Bruce went on to say that he supposed, as former opposition members had supposed, that this partial sale would be followed by further sales of parts of Telstra—forgetting the government's commitment not to proceed with any further sale of Telstra without first seeking the approval of the people of Australia by referendum or election.

The facts are that this is not a sale that places my electorate or my constituents at risk. But the other thing to be borne in mind—and the other point I would want to make on the comments from the member for Bruce—is that while the focus has been on this sale, as if the sale of Telstra were the only technique that the opposition had to fund its environment package, the opposition has conveniently forgotten that the motive for this sale is not funding the environment package but sorting out the economy that it inherited. The motive for this sale is to give the Australian economy an opportunity to be refreshed, a breather.

There are too many opposition members who too conveniently forget that during their period in government we saw this nation become increasingly less competitive. For example, from 1975 to 1988, when the now government had stewardship of the national books, we never recorded a current account deficit in excess of $1 billion. Out of the 150 months recorded from 1983 to 1995, when the now opposition had stewardship of the national books, on 96 occasions the current account deficit was over $1 billion. In fact, on 11 occasions it was over $2 billion. That was a measure of real economic failure.

As a result of that economic failure, our national income per capita and our position on the world scale of national income per capita slipped from 10th to 22nd. The economy is not something the now opposition can be proud of. The situation we have inherited has obliged this sale to allow us to address the fundamental economic problems we face.

While the member for Bruce was making his contribution, the member for Batman (Mr Martin Ferguson) interjected and suggested that since I was following in the debate as a South Australian I would have an interest in drawing a parallel between the sale of Telstra and the sale of SA Water. The reality, of course, is that the member for Batman was quite wrong. SA Water has not been sold by the South Australian government. In fact, SA Water has sold nothing more than the service delivery. The South Australian government retains the ownership of all of the capital assets of SA Water and all that has been sold is the service delivery.

Dr Theophanous —That's sophistry.

Mr ANDREW —The parliamentary secretary may want to listen to my rather useful illustration of what the sale of SA Water does. The sale of SA Water is like the South Australian minister taking a shower and standing there with his hands still on the taps, because he still has control of the water but the rose has changed—the technique for delivery is all that has effectively been sold.

The parliamentary secretary says that that is sophistry. Let me remind him that the only reason the South Australian government proceeded down this course was precisely the reason that forces the present federal government down this Telstra course—that is, they inherited an impossible budget situation.

Dr Theophanous —So that justifies selling water, does it?

Mr ANDREW —It absolutely does in SA Water terms, yes. The motivation behind the sale of Telstra is not simply to address the debt. There is also the question, as everyone has acknowledged, of what we do about the environment. Professor John Lovering, when addressing the Murray-Darling Association in Broken Hill late last year, said:

If you want to pick a fight in rural Australia, forget woodchipping, greenies and dole bludgers. If you want a blue, talk about water.

The real issue concerning rural Australia is the supply of water, particularly in a drought. Ask the member for Oxley (Ms Hanson), who hails from Queensland, about the experience Queenslanders have had—or indeed you, Mr Deputy Speaker Truss—over the last five years. The experiences have been all too dramatically changed in much of Queensland over the last week.

For most Australian rural producers, the key issue is the supply of water—and the supply of quality water. Nowhere is that more marked than in my own South Australian electorate. I have most of the key irrigation areas in South Australia in my electorate. I recognise, as the member for Murray (Mrs Stone) said in her maiden speech, the importance of the Murray-Darling Basin system to the supply of fruit and vegetables in Australia. What is happening across the Murray-Darling Basin system, as everyone in this House is aware and as every Australian is now aware, is that there has been a deterioration that cannot be allowed to continue. The document Saving our national heritage states:

One-third of the nation's output from rural industries originates in the Basin, of which three billion is derived from irrigation. Irrigation accounts for more than 95 per cent of the water diverted from the river systems in the Basin.

The problem is that salinity in rivers and streams is increasing alarmingly. Algal blooms are more frequent and severe, water quality is continuing to decline and wetlands and river flora have suffered. Agricultural loss as a result of the impact of salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin is calculated at $260 million per annum—an astonishing cost. It is a cost that has reflected the degeneration of the Murray-Darling Basin system.

This government proposes to do something about it by addressing what we do with the River Murray. The Prime Minister (Mr Howard) said in response to a question at question time two days ago that in six out of every 10 years the Murray effectively flows in a drought situation because of the amount of water that is now diverted out of the Murray and not replenished in some way. Under natural circumstances the drought flows would have been one in 20. As a government, the coalition proposes, aided by the Telstra sale, to direct $163 million to a Murray-Darling 2001 project to do something about the standard of water available to Murray irrigators, to New South Welshmen, to South Australians in general, and also to Victorians, particularly in the Sunraysia area.

This is a critical program. Every Murray-Darling irrigator, every South Australian, is dependent on the quality of the water delivered from the Murray-Darling into their homes. Take, for example, the member for Grey (Mr Wakelin). In his electorate, were it not for the diversion of River Murray water to the city of Whyalla there would be no industry; and, in 1996, it is probably fair to say there would be nothing more than a small town in the now city of Whyalla. My state depends on quality water from the Murray-Darling Basin. It depends totally on it and so do the key industries in which I have participated and which I represent as the member for Wakefield.

Much has been done, even by the former government, to in some way improve the quality of River Murray water. I am very conscious, for example, of the Woolpunda scheme where $27 million was allocated solely to identify underground saline flows which occurred in the Murray-Darling Basin and which had little to do with irrigation but a great deal to do with the fact that the area was once an inland sea. As a result of 26 tube wells being placed along the Murray-Darling Basin and intercepting these highly saline flows which had come from all over northern New South Wales—because this was once an inland sea—salinity at Morgan in South Australia was reduced by eight per cent. That was a step in the right direction.

It is interesting to note that the water intercepted by those tube wells and directed out to an evaporation basin has probably never been seen by the human eye and certainly never by the European eye until it comes out of the pipe into the evaporation basin. That is because it is water that fell as rainwater or existed there as inland seawater certainly before Europeans and possibly before human habitation of this great island. This scheme is picking up these saline flows going into the Murray-Darling Basin and diverting them. As a result of the scheme funded by the previous government, salinity has improved.

But, as anyone who knows anything about the Murray-Darling Basin can attest, the grim reality is that, with the demands we are placing on the basin as a result of expanded agricultural practice, principally in cotton but now to a large degree in wine grape production, and as a result of the drainage water that has accumulated, that eight per cent improvement is quickly lost with the demands that the Australian population is putting on this food bowl. Hence the need for a major program. Hence the need to allocate $163 million to continually improve the status of the Murray-Darling Basin. This is an allocation that cannot responsibly occur unless we generate the funds to make it happen, and those funds can only be generated out of the partial sale—and I emphasise `partial sale'—of Telstra.

So the government stands here proud of what it proposes to do. It proposes to maintain an essential Australian asset—still available to Australians, still recognising its community service obligations, still ensuring that the Flinders Island constituents of the member for Bass, the minister at the table, will have the same access to not only their existing telephone services but also improved ones—and still be able as a result of that sale to both improve the national economy and do something about the environment.

The Prime Minister has made it perfectly clear that he will set up what has been called a Natural Heritage Trust and that out of that trust $318 million will be allocated to a national vegetation initiative and 250,000 hectares of ground per annum will be revegetated. With all of the problems that the Murray-Darling Basin faces, the best way to deal with the surplus water currently occurring in the Murray-Darling Basin—as the result, in many instances, of drainage run-off that is not being picked up—is not to put in pumps as a way of intercepting that water but to plant trees, because day and night, without consuming fossil fuels, those trees provide a pump to lower the saline water levels. Hence the importance of the Natural Heritage Trust and the importance of the revegetation program proposed by the Prime Minister and to be funded by the legislation currently being considered in the House. I think the minister ought to be commended for the role he has played in putting this package to the House and making it available for real debate and consideration by all Australians.

On that note, I will make my final point. The member for Bruce, along with many opposite, has made much of the fact, as he saw it, that we, the government, could not claim a mandate for this particular action. It is self-evident in this chamber that we can claim a mandate, but the member for Bruce has suggested that in the other chamber people had taken out an insurance policy by which we could claim no mandate at all.

He was conveniently forgetting the statistics made available to every Australian by Malcolm Mackerras, who, looking at the Senate result from the 2 March 1996 election, pointed out that 40 senators went to the polls and 20—a half, would you believe—were returned as members of the Liberal or National parties. That hardly leaves a mandate for anyone else in their own right. I rest my case. A half were returned as members of the Liberal and National parties. Forget about this chamber, we are reflecting on the Senate. Fourteen were returned as members of the Australian Labor Party, five as members of the Australian Democrats and one as a Tasmanian Green.

I put this question to the House: what did the majority of Australians vote for? The simple, inescapable truth is that the majority of them voted for the Liberal and National parties, for this program and for a commitment that we have to the partial sale of Telstra and the consequent simultaneous tidy up of the economy and the environment. I commend the minister on this legislation, and commend it to the House.