Mr ORGAN (10:55 AM) —The Greens oppose the sale of Telstra. The Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill 2003 seeks to amend the Telstra Corporation Act 1991 to repeal the provisions that require the Commonwealth to retain 50.1 per cent equity in Telstra. In other words, the bill seeks to allow the government to sell off the rest of one of this nation's prime pieces of public infrastructure. The sale of such a valuable public asset is both fiscally and socially irresponsible and, what is worse, the government refuses to listen to the people of Australia on this issue.

Before referring to my own electorate of Cunningham, I would like to briefly comment on statements by some of the previous speakers. The member for New England pointed out that in rural and regional Australia the opposition to the sale is overwhelming. Surveys have shown that more than 92 per cent of people are against it, and it is undoubtedly high in metropolitan areas as well. Likewise, Telstra as a business continues to make a substantial contribution to the public coffers, with an annual dividend of $1.4 billion. Here we have the unpopular sale of a valuable asset. The Australian Greens' policy has always been to oppose the sale of Telstra, despite comments by the member for Melbourne that Labor, and Labor alone, has been the only party to maintain such a position. The Greens go further—we believe that the government should in fact increase its ownership of the telco and claw back some of the 49.9 per cent at present in private ownership.

The government's misguided position is clear: support its rich mates, support the big end of town, reduce capital expenditure, sack staff and sell off Telstra. The member for Eden-Monaro, in defence of the government's position, told us that `the real issue is service, not ownership'. Well, ownership in public hands equals service; ownership in private hands equals profit. The member for Eden-Monaro also told us to rest assured for service standards are entrenched in law. He said that the Howard government had put in place:

It is the law? The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Alston, has stated clearly on this matter that `legislation does bind future governments unless they change it'. So much for the law. I am afraid that the government's shallow assurances give me no solace, nor do they give the people of rural and regional Australia solace, for there is no guarantee that service standards will be maintained or improved just because the government says so. We just have to look around us and talk to our constituents to find ample examples of the failure to provide adequate and up-to-date telecommunications services to all Australians, especially those in rural, regional and remote areas. For example, there are a number of black spots in my electorate of Cunningham, located just 80 kilometres south of Sydney, so I can only imagine what the service is like in more remote areas of Australia.

The member for Eden-Monaro also brushed aside earlier speakers' claims that the vast majority of ordinary Australians are opposed to the sale of Telstra. He told us:

`You either make your decision or you never do.' Is the member for Eden-Monaro telling us to disregard the views of our constituents? Is the full sale of Telstra the member's own decision, or has he been told to support it by the minister? We know the member for Hume has made his own decision about the sale, and look what trouble that has landed him in with the party. He has abstained from speaking in this debate on an issue so dear to his heart and to his constituents. On such an important issue as the sale of Telstra, I can do nothing but support my constituents and oppose its further sale. If this government is arrogant enough to think that it can continue to so flagrantly oppose what is in the best interests of this country—and what the people of Australia are clearly telling them they want—then the government will surely pay the price at the ballot box. In his second reading speech on this bill, the Minister for Education, Science and Training said that the government:

The member for Eden-Monaro told us that Telstra will be sold off when `service levels get to acceptable standards'. Acceptable to whom? To the government? To the community? It is clear that the community is not satisfied with Telstra's performance. I do not know how adequate telecommunications services are in the minister's metropolitan seat of Bradfield or in the rural seat of Eden-Monaro, but I can assure both members of the government that in my seat of Cunningham they are pretty pathetic—not through any fault of Telstra workers but because of the specific privatisation policy of this government and the pressure being put on management to prune back staff in preparation for a full sale.

We have heard numerous accounts in this House over recent months of the inadequacies of Telstra services in electorates throughout Australia. I will not bore honourable members with a litany of Telstra woes from my electorate of Cunningham, but a couple of brief case studies will illustrate the point. On 4 July this year, I joined eight sacked Telstra maintenance workers and their union representative in a protest in central Wollongong. The workers had just been given notice of their sacking—they were declared redundant—and were on seven weeks leave with pay whilst they came to terms with the announcement. All of those workers wanted to keep their jobs. However, as we stood outside the Telstra building in Wollongong, Telstra management instructed those workers, by SMS, not to join the so-called protest. If they did, it would affect their redundancy entitlements. The workers were being gagged by the Telstra management. Why? What did Telstra have to hide?

These unfortunate workers, many with mortgages and family commitments, were being denied the opportunity to speak to the media about how they truly felt, having been sacked from positions which some of them had been in for 20 to 30 years or more. There was over 200 years worth of local experience amongst the eight workers sacked that day, and all of this experience was lost to Telstra and the local community. They had been sacked for no good reason. They had been declared redundant by Telstra management despite the fact that service standards in Wollongong could not be guaranteed. In fact, Telstra management had told us that major cable faults in the Illawarra had been fixed, but domestic and business customers are still hung out at the end of a network of smaller cables which are subject to interruption every time it rains—and it rains a lot in Cunningham.

I was frankly appalled that the national telecommunications carrier would sack eight maintenance workers, one of whom had 34 years experience, at a time when they and their colleagues were being forced to work regular overtime—to do the very same fault repair work for which they were now told they were not needed. There was no genuine justification for these job cuts. This action could result only in a decrease in the quality of service available to the people of the Illawarra. There is more than enough work just to maintain the present system, and the local experience of the sacked workers is sorely needed.

At the same time that Telstra was sacking workers in Wollongong and Sydney, it was also running a publicity campaign, proclaiming `local people, local knowledge, local solutions'. What hypocrisy! Telstra was spruiking about local people and local knowledge at the very same time that it was sacking eight local maintenance workers with over 200 years experience between them. I met with Telstra Country Wide's regional manager some weeks ago, and he assured me that major problems associated with pressure loss in underground cables had been fixed in all but one case after the expenditure of around $2 million. That is all very well, but the major cable assets are not where many of the problems in my electorate occur. The problems are in that last 100 to 150 metres of copper wire that link the customer to the cable pit. The problems are in the cable pits themselves or in the kerbside cable which links the pits to major junctions.

The Telstra manager I mentioned a moment ago told me that many faults can now be fixed remotely from the exchange. Honestly, the mind boggles! Sure, some faults can be fixed in the exchange, but not the problems people in Wollongong confront every time it rains—not the pit problems or the house cable problems. Those faults need people to trace them, to lift the cable pit cover, to crawl under the house, to repair the water-affected cable joint. This is hands-on, front-line maintenance work, not something which can be fixed by the flick of an electronic switch in some far-off exchange. To say otherwise is to mislead the community, and the community is awake to such spin doctoring. One of my constituents wrote to me in June to express her feelings on the matter. She said:

Mr Windsor —Shame!

Mr ORGAN —Shame, indeed. Having already abandoned its formal training schemes, Telstra is now throwing years of experience and knowledge of our telecommunications system onto the scrap heap. Telstra should be maintaining and building on its skill base, not cutting jobs to boost the share price, not getting rid of experienced workers with all-important local knowledge. I can only imagine the pain and anger these people still feel, having their skills and experience thrown down the drain in yet another cost-cutting exercise to boost the Telstra share price ahead of moves by this government to sell off the rest of the telco via this bill.

Despite recent assurances to me by Telstra Country Wide management that Wollongong is now part of their portfolio, those eight workers were included in 109 jobs earmarked for redundancy in the Sydney metropolitan area. For Telstra to count Wollongong jobs in Sydney figures is nothing short of specious nonsense. If Wollongong is part of Sydney, how come we pay STD rates for calls? My local Telstra Country Wide manager told me that better community education, information and consultation is needed, but all that is happening is a regular paid advertisement in the local paper, the Illawara Mercury, and billboards with our Telstra Country Wide manager's smiling face on them. So much for delivering adequate telecommunications services to all Australians! And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Then there is the issue of maintaining the improvements to existing services—the second plank of the minister's promise about the timing of the sell-off. Let us talk about some of those improvements for a moment. Many of my constituents are having problems with data services—access to the Internet being an especially sore point. Here is what one of them wrote to me last month:

So there you have it: a small business operator, the sort of person this government constantly trumpets its support for, frustrated by one of those improvements to existing services the minister says the government has to be satisfied are in place before there is any further sale of Telstra. Another constituent moved from a local Internet service provider to Telstra's BigPond on the assumption that she would get better service from the `big guy'. It is a pity her expectations are not being fulfilled. She tells me:

Those few examples must mean that any sale of the remaining 50.1 per cent of Telstra is a very long way off indeed. We will be even worse off if the government is allowed to proceed with the sale of our remaining equity in the national carrier, because a fully privatised Telstra will put shareholders' interests first.

The minister told us that the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill 2003 provides additional safeguards for customers in regional areas, pointing to the communications minister's ability to impose a licence condition requiring Telstra to prepare and implement local presence plans. But, as is so often the case with legislation introduced by this government, the devil is in the detail. The truth is that the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts may make a licence condition requiring Telstra to maintain a local presence in regional, rural and remote parts of Australia—`may', you notice, not `shall'. He is under no obligation to do it. It really makes you wonder what this rush to full private ownership is all about, doesn't it? After all, who stands to benefit?

In the first Telstra sale back in 1997 the main institutional investors scored a windfall profit of $3 billion on the first day. But what about the small investors, those mainly mum and dad shareholders the Prime Minister is so proud of, who have taken a $6 billion bath on Telstra 2? The sale arrangements in this bill are far from clear, but what is blindingly obvious is that commissions and fees will suck about half a billion dollars out of the public pocket—and that is on top of the $440 million which went to the big financial end of town in the T1 and T2 sales.

The government is squandering an asset which has taken more than 120 years to accumulate. Telstra's assets are the result of countless hours of effort by hundreds of thousands of men and women who worked tirelessly in the national interest to give us a national communications carrier. Many years ago there was a popular T-shirt with the slogan `I own an airline, a bank and a phone company'. Well, we have sold off the bank and the airline. Let us not make the same mistake with the phone company.