Mr SNOWDON (12:43 PM) —The member for Dawson's contribution on the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill 2003 is certainly in contradiction to the views that she expressed so forthrightly in May of last year, which I will come to later. I notice she spent some time talking about Saddam Hussein. I am not sure that Saddam Hussein has got an interest in this debate, but I would have thought it behoved the member for Dawson to acknowledge the tragedy that occurred in Iraq this morning with the untimely and murderous death of Mr de Mello, the United Nations representative in Baghdad, and of a number of other United Nations employees. If the member for Dawson wants to talk about Saddam Hussein, let us talk about the real story in Iraq at the moment.

I notice that the member for Dawson has left the chamber. She introduced this topic into the debate. In a debate about Australian telecommunications, the member for Dawson talks about Saddam Hussein! What we know is that the United Nations did not cause the conflict in Iraq. The United Nations ought not to be the target of those people, those terrorists, who are insisting upon imposing their will upon the Iraqi community and other communities around the world.

Given that the member for Dawson was conferring on this chamber her views about Saddam Hussein, she might at the very least have acknowledged the travesty of the attack on the United Nations that took place in Iraq overnight. But no, we did not get that from the National Party; we did not get that from the member for Dawson. In discussing this issue the member for Dawson ought to have acknowledged that the United Nations are very important in gaining a peaceful outcome in Iraq and should not be the target of attacks such as the one which was so cowardly made upon the United Nations headquarters in Iraq last night.

The member for Dawson also talked about a survey. She told us that 81 per cent of her community oppose the full sale of Telstra.

Mr Windsor —And she is listening to them!

Mr SNOWDON —This is a person, as my colleague says, who is listening to her community! She said she was listening to her community last year and she insisted that there should not be the full sale of Telstra. She now tells us that even though 81 per cent of her community oppose any further sale of Telstra, she thinks it is a good idea. And then she has the hide to tell us that she believes that she is listening to the community. You can ask exactly what that means and it is this: ask a question, get the answer; do not like the answer, tell a fib. A number of fibs have been told by the government over the last little while, not the least of which has been one in the performance by the Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government, Mr Tuckey, over the last 24 hours.

We know not to trust the government. Now we know not to trust the National Party. It is very clear that you cannot rely on the National Party now to tell the truth about what their communities are doing and to properly represent them in this place. That is of grave concern to me as one of those people in this place who represent a large rural electorate.

My electorate—unlike the member for Dawson's, I have to admit—covers an area of 1.34 million square kilometres. I can tell her that the telecommunications services in that community are far from adequate. The future proofing idea which has been posited by the government will not solve the problems that remote Australia has in relation to the current provision of services or the downstreamed provision of services that will come about when new technologies are introduced.

This debate has revealed the extent to which the National Party has turned on its constituents. We have seen ample evidence of that today in the member for Dawson's contribution. But we ought to understand the context in which this debate is being had. Less than a week ago, approximately 50 million people in the north-east of the United States and the bordering parts of Canada were left without power after an unprecedented network failure. The precise cause of this failure has not been determined but it has long been acknowledged that the privately owned utilities in the US have neglected to appropriately maintain their networks in the interests of increasing their profit margins.

A debate is raging in the United States—and I daresay elsewhere in the world now—that is centred on the difficulties that government has in regulating these privately owned utilities. This is not, as we know, a new debate. The residents of California have been suffering rolling blackouts and are paying almost twice the rates for power than they paid before the radical deregulation measures were implemented in 1995. In the face of these problems, including the recent crisis in New York, the United States Congress is now struggling to find a way to implement the regulations and controls of the industry that are obviously needed.

Does this sound familiar? It should because it is the message that the member for Dawson has given in her numerous warnings against the sale of Telstra. As she told the Canberra Times on 28 May last year:

Now she is in here advancing the argument that somehow or other you can future proof—whatever `future proofing' means—tele-communications services to Australians. What nonsense.

We do not hear the member for Dawson or any of her coalition colleagues telling the community the truth these days. A once proud party—and I have spoken about this before in this chamber—that my grandfather was associated with which was once prepared to stand up for people in country Australia is clearly not prepared to stand up for people in country Australia any more, at least when it comes to telecommunications.

In terms of speaking up for the communities that we represent, I note that the member for Solomon is not listed to speak in this debate. He is not in the chamber because he is at another function, and I respect his need to be there. But he is a person who will try and convince the Northern Territory community that they will get a positive outcome as a result of the full sale of Telstra. He is not even listed to speak, to advance an argument, so that they might understand what his position is. He comes from the CLP, another one of the coalition partners.

The only person on the other side of the chamber who has had the courage of his convictions is the member for Hume. He is the only member of the government who has the guts to say what everyone in the House knows: that Australians want to keep Telstra in majority government ownership because they know that it is in the national interest to do so.

We know—as has been repeated here ad nauseam in this debate—that the government and its representatives in this chamber have been trying to tell the Australian community the opposite. They have tried to sell the message that the full privatisation of Telstra will enhance the strength and competitiveness of our economy. They have also tried to sell the message that opposition to this sale is nonsensical and based on outdated ideology. The member for Cook berated the shadow minister for communications in a contribution on Monday this week. He said:

Well, I have news for the member for Cook and all of his colleagues: there is only one ideologically retro party in this place, and it is those people who sit on the other side of the chamber. I will read what one of the most respected conservative publications had to say about privatisation of utilities in Europe. An article in The Economist on 27 June last year stated:

That is what this government fails to understand, or refuses to understand—the strategic interest that the nation has in maintaining ownership of Telstra.

This government cannot see past the ideology that drives it. It sees telecommunications infrastructure as just another commodity, which of course—as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker Corcoran, from your travels around Australia—it is not. It is not just another good that is best left to the free market to provide. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, and as all members of this parliament know, telecommunications infrastructure is a public good.

Australia, in particular, is disproportionately dependent on telecommunications because of our relative isolation from the rest of the world and because of the vast distances between population centres. Nowhere is that more obvious than in my own communities in Lingiari, which of course, as I have pointed out on many occasions, makes up the bulk of the Northern Territory—and, indeed, in Christmas and Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. This is what makes telecommunications so important to the social and economic fabric of our nation. This is why we cannot afford to subject this infrastructure to the very real risks of private ownership that have been demonstrated in the failures of public utilities elsewhere in the world.

While the government continues its long march away from Australia's national economic interests, the rest of the world is heading the other way. These recent international developments were noted by John Quiggan, a senior research fellow with the Australian Research Council. Dr Quiggan wrote in the journal Growth in December last year:

In fact, there are many other governments around the world that have retained partial-government ownership of their national telecommunications carriers, despite this government's insistence that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Some of these countries include France, Ireland, Finland, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan and the list goes on. SingTel, one of the world's most competitive international telcos, is fully government owned.

If you sift through the government's rhetoric, you can even find occasional admissions of the risks involved in leaving important public industries in the hands of the market. As the Minister for Small Business and Tourism told ABC's AM program on 28 May last year, the insurance market could benefit from governments renationalising privatised insurance companies. He told the program:

When asked what this meant in terms of the coalition's privatisation ethos, he said:

The minister was on the money on that score, but clearly there is a long way between his admissions in relation to the need to have government involvement in the insurance market and what he is currently providing in terms of his support for the government's proposals to privatise Telstra. The importance of telecommunications infrastructure to the communities in my electorate and to the national economy cannot and should not be underestimated. There is a very real risk that a market failure may require a future government to regain control and ownership of the sector at great financial cost to the taxpayers of the day.

There are other economic arguments against full privatisation which are also worth a brief mention. Many believe that the Australian share market is far too small to effectively support a major new float of the remaining government stake in Telstra. Another important argument is that continuing government ownership of Telstra has a beneficial effect on the Commonwealth budget. Telstra has never been a loss-maker—not once. Instead, it has been a significant payer of dividends to the Commonwealth over many years. The flow of dividend streams would be terminated by the sale proposed by this bill, with adverse revenue consequences for future budgets.

Some of the National Party sell-outs have been arguing that the capital raised by a sale could potentially be used to improve rural and regional telecommunications infrastructure. I am surprised by this argument because, for the past 12 months, they have been telling their constituents how wonderful this infrastructure is and what a great job Telstra has done in providing services to the bush. How can they go into their electorates and say that the infrastructure crisis will only be solved through a massive spending campaign following the full privatisation of Telstra?

There are a number of ways in which you could fund future infrastructure—not the ways in which the government is proposing, but by using and earmarking some of the Telstra's annual dividend payments to the Commonwealth and quarantining them for re-investment in Telstra's regional infrastructure. I believe that would be an appropriate way to use those funds. In the same way, the universal service obligation levies that are paid by private carriers like Optus could be diverted to regional infrastructure investment. To me, these alternatives are good public policy and good economic policy.

I will now speak about my electorate in particular. On 1 August, comments made by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Alston, were reported on radio in the Northern Territory. It was stated that:

It was further stated that the minister said that this `phenomenal' mobile phone coverage has:

The minister might be happy to claim that he has `broken the back of the problems' in remote communities, but of course he has not. At the same time he has denied new services to some of the largest of these communities in northern Australia. I remind the House of the commitment that the minister gave on 5 April last year to provide Australian towns with populations over 500 with mobile phone coverage. He said at the time:

Under that program, the government pledged to provide 132 towns with a population of more than 500 with CDMA coverage and a further 40 towns with GSM base stations. However, when you looked at the fine print you could see that the government made four exceptions—four only—to that pledge: all large Indigenous communities in my electorate in the Northern Territory. Wadeye, with a population of over 2,400, is the fifth largest town in the Northern Territory and the largest Aboriginal community in Australia. Yet the minister decided it was too costly to provide this community with mobile phone coverage. The same goes for the sixth- and seventh-largest towns in the Northern Territory—Maningrida and Galiwinku—and another large town, Milingimbi, was also left off the list of places that the minister was interested in. The minister did promise to investigate alternative telecommunications solutions in these places but—as I might inform you in the chamber, Madam Deputy Speaker—these communities are still waiting. They are still wondering about and still wanting to know what the minister and the government are proposing to do about extending to them the same sorts of services that other Australians expect. If this were a non-Indigenous community, we know what would happen: they would have their services. But when we are talking about a community of about 2½ thousand, as in the case of Wadeye—a remote Indigenous community and one of the poorest communities in Australia—it has no services. It would not happen in regional New South Wales or in small towns in Victoria or South Australia.

I will relate another couple of issues to do with telecommunications in the electorate. From Howard Springs, a town just 25 kilometres south of Darwin, I have had three complaints from constituents who have no coverage for their mobile phones. The same story exists in Acacia, just 60 kilometres south of Darwin on the Stuart Highway. The constituents of this town have neither digital nor CDMA coverage. Travelling on down the Stuart Highway, just 80 kilometres from Darwin, is a small business owner in Darwin River. This constituent owns a mobile hydraulic hose business and he needs to be able to offer his customers EFTPOS through his mobile. This service is normally available on digital phones but he has no digital coverage and the CDMA network, which is meant to be the panacea for all of those woes in rural Australia, cannot apply this technology. From the remote Aboriginal communities of Kintore, Daly River and Yirrkala I have received many complaints about the difficulty in getting Internet connections and the servicing of phone lines and equipment. It often takes more than two weeks for these communities to get their broken phones and lines serviceable again. It is time the government came clean, it is time the National Party stood up for rural constituents and it is time the government got rid of this nonsense—this view that somehow or other the Australian community will be advantaged by selling off any further parts of Telstra. Telstra should remain in public ownership. (Time expired)