Mr BEVIS (11:29 AM) —I rise to speak on the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill 2003. The purported benefits from the sale of the first two tranches of Telstra which the member for Wentworth referred to in his speech had nothing to do with the sale of Telstra. All the benefits to which he referred related to the end of the government monopoly and the introduction of competition into the telecom-munications field, something undertaken by the former Labor government. Indeed some of those things that he ascribed to sale of Telstra are just factually wrong, and I will come to those shortly. Also factually wrong was the assertion that people who live in rural and remote Australia are confident that their current services are up to scratch and the assertion that those services will be maintained—even at their current substandard level—in a post-sale environment. I will come to that shortly as well. I stand firmly opposed to this bill and to the sale of Telstra, and I do so having campaigned very strongly on this issue in my seat of Brisbane at the last election. I widely campaigned on this issue at a number of gatherings and in a number of publications.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The member for Wentworth has had his opportunity to speak.

Mr BEVIS —Although the people of Brisbane may stand to gain more from the sale than some others, they know that this policy pursued by the government is not in the best interests of our nation and not in the best interests of good public policy. Even though I represent an inner city seat, this issue is one which all Australians feel united about. If you doubt the views of the people, you should ask Alby Schultz what reaction he has had in his electorate. I want to refer to the concerns of people in rural Australia and to an organisation which I thought the National Party would have had some empathy with: the Western Australian Farmers Federation. These people are not normally quoted by members of the Labor Party, but on this issue I think they are clearly of one mind with the people in my electorate and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of Australians. Why those in cocky corner on the other side of the House have forsaken their constituency in the bush on this matter, I do not know; they once again demonstrate that they are Liberals in gumboots. They are Liberals in wellington boots being towed along by this government to destroy a core element of their own constituency. I will quote from a letter written on 12 August this year by the Western Australian Farmers Federation, which I expect those in cocky corner would also have received:

The letter went on:

That example of privatisation was mentioned by the member for Wentworth as a glowing example of why it would be a good thing to sell Telstra. I assume that he got the same letter I did from the Western Australian Farmers Federation telling him that that is a glowing example of why we should not be selling Telstra, because what they have ended up with is a lower grade service that now costs them more. The letter continued:

They are under no illusion as to what the outcome of the success of this bill would be: an even worse telecommunications environment for rural communities in Western Australia. I believe there would be a similar outcome for provincial and rural communities throughout the nation. The Western Australian Farmers Federation are clear about that.

When the government talk about this issue they often talk about where they are going to spend the money. Certainly, as backbenchers and ministers travel the country they like to talk about where the proceeds of this sale will be put. This will go down in political history—if the government have their way—as the biggest pork barrel in this nation bar none. It will outstrip any pork-barrelling ever undertaken in the political history of this country. We have already seen the government spend the total proceeds three or four times over. They are making promises to every interest group and every community in the country. If you add up all these promises, you find that you would have to sell Telstra three or four times over to get the money to pay for this pork-barrelling. We have the Treasurer saying that he wants to put the proceeds into some term deposit, possibly at the Reserve Bank. He has also suggested that we buy shares on the stock exchange with some of the proceeds from the sale of Telstra. We have the Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin, saying that he wants to retire debt with these moneys. And we have the Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, coming up with a new idea for every community he goes into.

This is a bottomless bucket of money apparently. This is not the bucket with the hole in it—don't get the straw, Johnny—but it is the bucket that never ends. We have heard of the never-ending story; this is the never-ending bucket of money when it comes to the Telstra sale. Liberal and National Party members have crisscrossed the nation promising everybody everything on the back of the sale of Telstra—using this money as if it were a magic pudding. Come the election, as these promises come under greater scrutiny, it is going to become obvious what a nonsense that is. At the moment, government backbenchers are being duped. They believe that if they support this, whilst they will have to deal with the heat of their electors who are opposed to the sale, they will be able to assuage that concern because there will be a big bucket of money coming their way. I say to government backbenchers: get out your calculators and do the sums. I am afraid that this is not a magic pudding. Even if you sell Telstra, there is a finite bucket of money. You simply cannot do those things already promised—let alone do all those things on the list that will grow between now and election time.

That the public are opposed to this sale is beyond any doubt. I commend the member for Hume for the frank comments he made last week. I would like to quote briefly from his doorstop interview last week. A journalist asked him about his surveys and he said:

I interpose here to note that members of parliament often conduct surveys and it is rare to get a hundred responses a day. If you are getting a hundred responses a week then you know that you have a serious issue on your hands.

Mr Windsor —He got 600 responses.

Mr BEVIS —Yes. The public response to this is not just strong; it is deep-seated. The member for Hume commented that he was getting a hundred responses a day and went on to say:

The journalist then asked if that surprised the member for Hume, to which he answered:

Let there be no doubt of the public will in this matter. The public will is opposed to the sale, and the member for Hume has at least had the honesty and the decency to stand up and make that clear to the Australian public and to this parliament—and for his trouble he is being treated like a leper by the other side of the parliament. But he is in fact right in saying that.

I also want to take the opportunity to put to rest one of the regular arguments that is raised by our opponents in the Liberal and National parties and, indeed, in the Senate from time to time by the Democrats and the Greens. They refer to Labor's record in government in selling assets. We certainly did sell a number of assets, including Qantas and part of the Commonwealth Bank. I do not have time here to go through the reasons for that, although I have done that on other occasions. But I do want to make absolutely clear, yet again, the deliberate decision Labor made not only not to sell Telstra but also to put into the law of Australia a requirement that Telstra remain in public ownership. People either do not know or seem to have forgotten that, until Labor introduced its legislation for competition in telecommunications in 1991, there was no requirement for Telstra to be owned by the government. Any cabinet of the day could have sold Telstra, all of it, without ever coming before the parliament. That changed because Labor decided that it was important for Telstra to be publicly owned. Why? Because, unlike the airline and the Commonwealth Bank, Telstra was and is an essential service in the daily lives of Australians and in the commerce of this nation; without it we could not function. It is as valuable to the ongoing activities of people in Australia as the road outside their door, the school that their children go to, the water that comes out of their tap and the electricity that is provided for their lighting. It is an essential service, and we understood that in 1991.

I want to quote from the second reading speech of the then Labor Minister for Transport and Communications, Kim Beazley, when he introduced this measure and made that point very directly. He pointed out:

They were the words and commitments given by Kim Beazley as Minister for Transport and Communications in 1991 when we introduced competition. Up until that time any government could have sold off Telstra. Had we not done that—had Labor not required in the act that Telstra be owned by the people—John Howard would have sold it off years ago. The only thing that stopped John Howard selling Telstra off five years ago was that Labor's legislation required it to be publicly owned. So let us dispense with this argument we get from members of the Liberal and National parties and, I might say, the Democrats and the Greens that somehow Labor has dirty hands on the issue of the sale of Telstra. Not only has Labor supported, at every post, public ownership of Telstra, but also it was Labor that put in place the legal requirement that Telstra be maintained in public ownership.

I might add a comment that Kim Beazley made at the time. He said:

Indeed, that package of reforms did engender major growth in telecommunications. That was alluded to by the member for Wentworth; he just did not understand what produced it. The reforms that introduced competition and expanded the market in 1991 under Labor's reform package at that time resulted in a marked and dramatic improvement in the range and quality of services and the competition that it provided for all consumers, business and residential. But the public ownership of Telstra was, front and centre, a core requirement of that reform package that Labor put in place, because we understood its critical importance as an essential service to all Australians.

The then Minister for Transport and Communications, Kim Beazley, made comment about the economic benefit of public ownership. I want to say something about that, because we can now talk about the experience of the sale of the first tranches and how much money we got from that, how much we saved and how much we would have got if we had actually kept the whole of Telstra in public ownership and just taken the share dividend. An article was drawn to my attention by John Quiggin, an Australian Research Council Senior Fellow at ANU and also at the Queensland University of Technology; he did a paper on this for Australian Policy Online. He pointed out that, in the case of Telstra, the first and second stages of privatisation have actually produced large and growing losses.

The detail of that was set out by the member for Perth, Stephen Smith, in his previous capacity as shadow minister for telecommunications, and it is worth recalling. This is not speculation; this is calculation of past events. By retiring some $12.8 billion worth of debt, over the course of 1997-98 through to 1999-2000 the government has saved some $2.7 billion in interest payments. Had we not sold Telstra and kept all the dividend payments made over those three years, we would have received in dividends $2.78 billion. That is, we would have been better off to the tune of $81 million if we had actually not sold Telstra—and that is just in three years.

Mrs Gallus —And then we wouldn't have been able to pay down the debt.

Mr BEVIS —Obviously the parliamentary secretary at the table is not listening to the debate or she would have heard me mention the figures of debt savings by retiring debt. The simple fact of life is that in those three years the nation of Australia, the Commonwealth of Australia, lost $81 million net because we had sold Telstra. That figure grows as each year goes by. Here we are now proposing to sell the rest of it and thereby to compound the felony, not because there is any good economic sense to it but because of an ideological dogma that exists on the other side of the chamber.

If you look at the assessments for the future, you find the situation is equally bleak. Indeed, if you take the UBS Warburg analysis of the Telstra dividend for 2004-05—which they estimate to be 31c—and use that as your base, you will discover that over the course of the next four years, from 2005-06 through to 2008-09, the net impact of the sale if it goes through will be that the Australian taxpayers will be $1.6 billion worse off. The net result will be that we will lose money by selling Telstra. After you deduct the benefit of the savings to debt—that is, not having to pay the interest on the debt because you cut down the debt—and then have a look at the revenue you would have got if you had kept all of the shares, you find that we will be $1.6 billion worse off by the year 2008-09. We know for a fact we are $81 million worse off because of what we have already done, and now we are proposing to make ourselves $1.6 billion worse off in the course of the next five years. That defies logic. Of course, it does sit comfortably with the Liberal Party and the National Party, who see intrinsic good in privatising anything and in private ventures.

That rather amuses me when you look at the performance of private companies, particularly large ones—and we have to acknowledge that Telstra is a particularly large company in the Australian context. If you have a look at the operation, transparency and ethics of some large companies here and around the world, you would have to say that you really would not want to put too many of your own dollars into them. Whether it is one of the huge overseas examples like Enron or whether it is a home grown variety like HIH, One.Tel or Harris Scarf, where millions of dollars have evaporated even though as public companies they supposedly published audited accounts, you start to wonder whether Australian management and the propriety of Australian management is up to the mark that it should be. But it is not just here in Australia. There are examples in Europe, and there are certainly many examples in the United States, where very large corporations have done the wrong thing.

There is one other important aspect of this—there are many other aspects that time does not allow me to touch on—telecommunications is one of the key industries for economic growth in the future. Australia has an opportunity to be a driving engine in that and to make it one of our growth industries that generates both income and good, smart, well-paid jobs. We can have that opportunity, or we can sell it out to overseas interests, which will effectively be those able to pull the strings irrespective of what safeguards are put in place.

I spent some time around the industry debate, and particularly around information technology and telecommunications companies. When you talk to the chief executives of foreign companies who are here in Australia, on the quiet they will tell you that they want to be able to get involved in projects here and to export into markets in our region but they cannot because the internal company policy directed from overseas prevents them from doing so. I have had them come to me and seek support in arranging circumstances for them to put pressure on their parent companies so that they can do those things here to benefit Australia. Why would we want to hand one of our key companies and key industries to that dynamic, which is what the sale of Telstra would do? It is a critically important industry with a great opportunity, and it should remain in public hands. Defeat of this bill is in the public interest. Defeat of this bill will improve the bottom line of the federal budget. It will be better for future export growth in telecommunications, it will be better for the Australian economy, it will be better for competition for consumers, it will be better for Australian industry and it will be better for all Australians. This bill should be defeated and those members, particularly those in the National Party, who support it deserve particular condemnation.