Mr HAYES (12:59 PM) —Mr Deputy Speaker, I too congratulate the member for Riverina on her speech that we have just heard. I rise with the backing of approximately 70 per cent of Australians to oppose the sale of Telstra and to oppose the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Future Proofing and Other Measures) Bill 2005 and related bills. I stand with those who oppose the sale because I know, and the overwhelming majority of the Australian public knows, that a privatised Telstra will lead to increases in prices and decreases in services. A privatised Telstra will result in increased complaints and decreased telecommunications infrastructure investment and a privatised Telstra will result in an increased focus on profits and a decreased focus on customer service. My message to the government today is pretty clear: fix it, don’t sell it. This is a simple message, but one that must be heard. It is a simple message that the constituents in my electorate of Werriwa want to make sure that the government not only hears but also takes notice of.

This debate is a timely one, for me at least, because on Monday I finally received an answer to a question I put in the Notice Paper to the Minister representing the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Some 100 days after it was placed on the Notice Paper, I finally got a response. I was pleased to receive it because it pointed out the gross deception that this government is attempting to perpetrate on my constituents. In the response, based on information provided by the minister for communications, the claim is made that broadband services are available in all areas of my electorate.

Like the member for Riverina, I would like the minister to come to my electorate and give an explanation to the people who were led to believe that a broadband ADSL connection was available, only to be offered the more expensive and slower ISDN connection. Once again it is a case of the government being particularly careful with the language it uses about broadband. It is perpetrated to trick people in my electorate and others. Customers are being told that broadband is available everywhere. ADSL connections are advertised and people are told that the exchanges are ADSL enabled, but when connection is attempted, they find that it is only ISDN that is available.

The evidence from on the ground in my electorate is borne out by the evidence collected by National Economics. National Economics reported estimates that although 90 per cent of the population now had access to broadband, only about 35 per cent of telephone exchanges are ADSL enabled—only 35 per cent! Even the New South Wales Farmers Federation—obviously no friend to Labor, I might add—is quite critical of this sale. The Farmers Federation has expressed concerns about whether the earnings from The National’s slush—I am sorry, trust—fund will be enough to provide the latest technology for the future. The results of the survey conducted by the New South Wales Farmers Federation in July this year found that 80 per cent opposed the sale and 52 per cent said Telstra was not meeting their needs presently.

The numbers are similar, quite frankly, in the outer metropolitan areas in electorates such as my own. Recently I raised the issue in our local newspapers and, as a result, my office received numerous complaints. The most common complaint that we received in response to putting this ad in the newspaper was unsatisfactory access to ADSL broadband. People in my electorate felt that, even though they were living on the edge of Australia’s most global city, they were missing out on the critical piece of infrastructure that would allow them to improve their education and the education of their kids and access to technology that would allow them to more effectively search for work. Small business people are equally affected. In my electorate, as in others, they have invested in technology to try and get themselves ahead of the competition. But they find that when they want to expand their businesses and use modern means of communication, their entry into the information superhighway is just another piece of infrastructure that appears to be still on the drawing board.

The anecdotal evidence from my constituents is backed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which reported in its telecommunications monitoring bulletin No. 30 that Campbelltown, in the outer metropolitan area of Sydney—just 50 kilometres from the heart of Sydney—has one of Australia’s worst telephone exchanges. They are not my words; they are the words of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. That is not the proudest achievement for the south-west of Sydney, but one that points to the fact that it is not just rural and regional Australia who are missing out. Outer metropolitan areas certainly are not getting the services they need, want or deserve either.

Telstra is struggling to provide the level of services demanded by customers now; it is failing to invest in the infrastructure Australia needs now. So what can we expect for the future? Maybe the unspoken reason why the government is confident that adequate levels of investment will occur in the future is that over the last few years a chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, as recently revealed by the new CEO, was actually at the behest of the government as it fattened Telstra up for sale.

The strangest thing about this debate is the long line of government members who have gotten up to support it. I find it very strange because generally there are very few on the other side of this place who get up to support other initiatives of this government. I can only presume that each is supporting it not because they agree with the sale but so that they can justify their claim for cashing in on the Telstra slush fund. I for one will not be surprised if most of the money goes to coalition electorates. It has happened before, not only with the Regional Partnerships program but also with the Connect Australia fund—79 per cent of applications and 72 per cent of approvals. As a result, 72 per cent of funds were allocated to coalition held electorates.

Government members continue to come into this place to try and praise the decision to sell, and to start their bidding for a slice of the Telstra pie. I remember distinctly the bid by the member for Bass, who claimed that he supported the sale. He said:

With that statement, another coalition member joined the veritable parade of privatisation proponents desperate to reach in and grab their fistful of dollars out of the Telstra pot of gold. If the reason that the member for Bass supports the sale is that his electorate is in a position of need, then I believe he would be better served by crossing the floor and joining the opposition. If he welcomes moves to improve telecommunications services to his electorate, he should stand with us to support Labor’s desire to see Telstra fixed.

Members opposite have also accused previous Labor governments of not being up front about the privatisation of government business entities such as Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. I say to them that the fundamental difference between this situation and the privatisation of other government businesses is that those governments were not taking a public monopoly and making it a private monopoly. Previous Labor governments have not transferred the potential to earn monopoly rents into private hands. Members opposite may claim that there is competition in telecommunications but, let us face it, even the Telstra bosses admit that competition is really only occurring in low-cost areas.

Concentration in the telecommunications market has not been fundamentally diluted. Telstra remains a monopoly—the revenue figures tell that story. Currently, Telstra earns 75 per cent of fixed-line voice revenues and has an 82 per cent market share of basic line rentals. It earns 79 per cent of revenues from the broadband market. This situation and the level of concentration in the market is the fundamental difference to what was faced by government businesses privatised by previous governments. This sale is another example in a growing list where one thing is said prior to an election and something vastly different is said and done after it.

I would like to offer fair warning to members opposite and to coalition members in the other place that the Australian public has a long memory. As far as the public is concerned, actions speak louder than words. The crux of the issue before us today is not how much the government might get from the sale, how much each coalition member who records their vote might get from the Telstra slush fund, nor the relatively small size of the fund itself. Quite frankly, the key issue is fixing Telstra so that it can be productive within the Australian economy.

Telstra has admitted that its services now are far from up to scratch; that the board, the management and probably even the minister have been asleep at the wheel for the last few years and that the services have gone downhill. This is probably the single most disturbing thing about the whole Telstra fiasco. Here we have a company that comes under government oversight, where the majority of ownership is in government hands, where the government appoint the majority of the board and the government are supposed to keep a watchful eye, with the minister for communications, well and truly tracking this organisation. Yet we have found that this organisation is well on its way to ruin.

The Australian public, me included, are now rightly asking what is going on. If this was allowed to happen under government ownership, what sort of future proofing are customers going to have when Telstra is transferred into private ownership? Are we looking at another One.Tel situation just over the horizon on a scale never before seen in this country? Certainly the possibility is not too far from the minds of many members of the Australian public today. Oversight will be reduced and we have already seen the willingness of this organisation to flout the disclosure laws of this country. What is going to be left to stop them in the future?

The problems that the government is trying so hard to run away from with these bills were pointed out to the Prime Minister and his senior ministers on 11 August this year. They were not pointed out by the opposition; they were not pointed out by the media. They were pointed out to the Prime Minister by the people who run Telstra. They were pointed out by someone who had only just walked through the doors of the organisation, someone who had only just taken over the role of CEO. With his management team, he had a look at the current state of the business. That is telling—at least it was for the share market. The Prime Minister and his colleagues had it pointed out to them that, given the state of the network, the amount of money required to bring it up to speed was astronomical.

People are already asking what the state of our telecommunications system will be under a privatised Telstra. They already know that things are not that great and wonder—if the government cannot even get it right now—what compulsion there will be on a privately owned monopoly to get it right in the future? Both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have claimed that they are not distressed sellers.

Yesterday we heard from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry that this bill was the culmination of many years work in convincing the electorate to support the full sale of Telstra and that the government had waited over a period of four elections to set about privatising it. Despite the minister’s clear misreading of the views of millions of Australians, if the government had been able to wait for four elections and it is not a desperate seller, as the Prime Minister and his Treasurer claim, then why are they selling it now? Why have they decided to push ahead with a sale after the share price has plummeted? The estimates contained in Budget Paper No. 1 show that the proceeds of the sale of Telstra are more than $11 billion a year for three years, starting in 2006-07. These figures are based on a share price of $5.25—yesterday the Telstra share price closed at $4.34—a mere 8c above its 12-month low. If the government is not desperate, it would reconsider this sale because it will put extra pressure on the budget position and extra pressure on public debt interest costs. However, it seems to me that the government really is desperate to sell so that it can distance itself from the disorder it has allowed to develop.

The Prime Minister clearly does not want to take any sort of responsibility for the serious problems facing Telstra that he has so far turned a blind eye to—he was not even sure this morning what his ministers knew—at least according to the ABC view I heard on AM this morning. The Prime Minister clearly wants to get rid of the problem as quickly as he possibly can so that he does not have to answer the tough questions and does not have to face up to what has clearly been a gross dereliction of duty by his government.

But the arrogance of this government does not stop with the Prime Minister’s desire to avoid answering the tough questions. In yet another example of the arrogance of this government, in today’s Australian an advertisement appears calling for submissions to the Senate inquiry into the Telstra privatisation bills. Clearly, the advertisement was put together in haste because it contains a spelling error but, what is worse, the submissions close at midday tomorrow! So if anyone wants to make a submission, they have to have that in by midday tomorrow. This government does not want to hear the concerns of Australians—be they business or residential customers—because they know the Telstra sale will be roundly condemned.

In a modern, globalised economy like our own, telecommunications infrastructure has transferred from the luxury it might once have been to an absolute necessity. Investment in high-quality communications and high-speed data transfer is part of the investment in the productive capacity of the Australian economy. It is no longer good enough to have an adequate telecommunications system if the basis for our ongoing economic development is innovation and export. (Time expired)