Mr CAMERON THOMPSON (8:50 PM) —It is a pleasure to rise this evening and speak in the debate on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Future Proofing and Other Measures) Bill 2005 and related bills. It is a very important debate and sets the future direction for telecommunications in Australia and provides some very important ballast that will, as has been stated in the title of the bill, future proof our country for telecommunications.

But I am concerned about the position being adopted by the Labor Party. The position that the Labor Party has put on Telstra is a lie. Its members know it, its supporters know it, business knows it, unions know it—everyone else in the community knows it. They know it because it is just not sustainable to maintain the current position, to operate Telstra and to present to Australia the view that, if Telstra is in public ownership, consumers of phone and data services across Australia, whether in rural or remote areas or in cities—no matter where you are—will be protected because, simply, the government has a stake in Telstra. It is a complete falsehood presented there by the Labor Party, and I want to underline it by quoting from the Leader of the Opposition’s speech earlier this evening, where he said:

That, on its face, is a falsehood. It is impossible for the opposition to present the idea that the ownership of this company predetermines the level of service that Australians will have. People do not get all their services from Telstra; they get them from an increasing range of other communications companies. And from Telstra themselves people get a service that is underpinned by the universal service obligation and by the customer service guarantee. Without that underpinning there would not be a guarantee, there would not be a level of service that could be relied upon. It has been this government’s role to put those sorts of underpinnings in place. Because we have those underpinnings in place, people in my electorate of Blair and people throughout Queensland and throughout Australia can look forward to improved services from not just Telstra but all telecommunications companies in this country for the foreseeable future.

It seems that the opposition is taking a leaf from the new CEO of Telstra and his friends, the three amigos. In that little excerpt I read from the opposition leader’s speech just a minute ago, Labor was, in effect, arguing against the regulation of Telstra—arguing against the provision of those very important underpinnings that will be necessary if we are going to have a continually improving level of telecommunications service. And when I say ‘improving’, I am not saying improving against a flat level of service as things apply today; I am talking about improving against the world standard as it continues to progress in the years ahead.

Labor is arguing against regulation of Telstra. It wants to go back to the days when it had Telstra as a kind of a pup that it could order about and in so doing predetermine what was going to be happening in people’s homes by way of their telephone communications. That has all gone. Even the Leader of the Opposition knows that. There have been many changes in the telecommunications sphere. The prospect of having your own pet telecommunications company and using that as a way of providing these essential services against other competitors, which now exist, and in a corporatised environment, which now exists, is just not possible. It would be the ultimate brick glider: it would fly like a stone. There is just no way. A Telstra operated as you could expect by the Labor Party—without any universal service obligation, without a customer service guarantee—would be a glider made of lead. It would go down fast. Once again you would have the Australian taxpayer picking up the mess left behind by a Labor government. You could see the mess that they would create just on the face of it. The opposition leader apparently is aware that there have been changes in the communications environment. The opposition leader said this in his speech:

That is from the opposition leader. So somewhere in that great fog, that great policy vacuum that is the Australian Labor Party, there is a perception that there have been changes out there in the environment and a move in the marketplace. But as to the impact it should have on the way the Labor Party should operate they seem to be completely unaware. They seem to be completely immune to a move to keep themselves in touch with the environment within which we must operate to provide the best possible services to people in rural and regional Australia, to people in the cities, to people who want ADSL and to people who want things from two-way satellite type communications to all those types of internet services that are well supported under the government’s HiBIS to things such as the PSTN.

The small business spokesman opposite was talking about the old black phones, the ones with the handle on the front. He is obviously not aware that in country areas those disappeared a long time ago and were replaced by digital radio concentrator systems, which were in turn replaced by satellites and other types of communications networks. We have had this continual renewal within the system, but the Labor Party is trading on ancient perceptions like: ‘A phone has got to come from Telstra. It’s got to be the PMG that delivers it.’ The Labor Party is relying on these ancient perceptions and these ancient views about the way the system works. That is what it is seeking to cash in on. When the opposition leader said, ‘All those programs disappear the day it is sold,’ he was endeavouring to fan those old fires, those old concerns. So the big scare campaign gets going.

I would like to ask a couple of things, because it is important we get to the bottom of what the Labor Party would do with something like the universal service obligation, which provides resources for the continuing development of telephone resources in country areas, and what they would do with the customer service guarantees, which provides people with protections so that, if their phone has not been reconnected, they can have a mobile service provided to them or get compensation if they are not provided with adequate service within the time set by the guidelines. Those two areas of regulation were provided by this government, not by the opposition. The opposition seem to be indicating, by their opposition to regulation and by leaping into bed with Sol and the amigos: ‘We want to be in a position where there should be less regulation.’ Are they saying that the universal service obligation—under which the government sets the quantum, under which companies first provide the money in accordance with their market share, under which the phone companies then tender to provide the work and then the work gets done—is to be done away with? If the opposition want to do away with that, there goes a very important structural beam that provides support to people in my electorate today that was not there before. By using these simplistic arguments about the ownership of Telstra, the opposition are trying to say that there is a threat to this kind of service when in fact what the government is on about is strengthening those beams, building those beams up, making sure that there is adequate regulation and making sure that there is provision of sources of capital.

That brings me to another point. Under the Labor Party’s proposed model for the operation of Telstra, we would be left with a scenario under which the real source for capital could only ever be the government. If major advances in the provision of infrastructure were to occur under the Labor Party model across Australia, where would the supply of capital come from? Of course, Labor would own Telstra, so it would come from Telstra. Therefore, I suppose, that would come from the Labor Party dividend, so that would reduce that a bit. On top of that, if that were not enough, Labor would have to kick in some more. If Labor had done away with the universal service obligation, you would not get any from Optus and you would not get any from Vodafone. All of those would not contribute. So you would be left with the government paying the way.

It is no wonder Labor were so totally incompetent at the management of the economy of Australia while they were in charge of it, and it is no wonder that we got into a situation where we wound up with $96 billion of government debt and where the coalition government is still in the throes of paying that money down, because Labor cannot run it. For heaven’s sake, having the Labor Party running a phone company is like having them running a government. It is an appalling prospect. To me, the idea that that form of regulation—that support which provides real comfort to people in my electorate today—could be knocked out by the Labor Party is absolutely reprehensible.

I would like to see the Labor Party commit to the retention of the universal service obligation and the customer service guarantee, but of course there is absolutely no policy and absolutely no position from Labor at all. Just as they said that they would not sell the Commonwealth Bank and they went ahead and did it, now they are happy to say this about Telstra. You know the old saying about making hay while the sun shines. That is what they are on about. They are not about putting a position that would be in the long-term best interests of the taxpayers of this country, the people in my electorate or the people in any of the electorates Australia wide.

The way ahead in Australia is to ensure that we introduce and continue to introduce strengthened competition into the phone industry. The way ahead is not only to keep developing the universal service obligation and the customer service guarantee but to keep our eye on the need for other regulations as time progresses and as demands develop in the marketplace. This is not the responsibility of the government; it is not the obligation of the government to also own a phone company. We are under no obligation to do that. We are under an obligation—on behalf of all taxpayers of this country, all operators, all people who have a phone and everybody who is coming in the next generation—to be in a position to lay down the law about what happens with phones in this country. And that is exactly what this government is doing.

The opposition is saying: ‘Get out of it. Don’t make any rules. Have a free-for-all, just so long as we have this great big pet phone company of our own.’ We know what would happen. Under Labor, you would wind up with Telstra owning all the least profitable sections of the phone business. They would be in an untenable position very quickly. They would be going down the chute so fast you could not keep up with them, no matter what you were riding. On the other side of the fence, you would have their competitors laughing all the way to the bank, being able to cherry-pick all the good, creamy opportunities, particularly in the capital cities, at no real risk.

Why do the Labor Party take this expedient position? It is expedient—and they keep saying it—because of those old biases, because of the old days of the PMG where the only way you would get a phone was by ringing up Telecom, as it was then. And everybody knows the great disdain with which you were treated when you were trying to hook up a phone back in the late seventies or the eighties under Telecom. People today complain about what are very short time frames for the delivery of services, compared to the absolute months that you had to wait to get an on-the-wall phone back in those days of Telecom.

The real, core issue is: where is the capital for infrastructure going to come from? The government model, the direction that we are heading in, provides us with a range of different sources that will all contribute to providing the capital we need in order to provide not just the ADSL type services we see today. The other day I heard that in Korea they are already planning a broadband service 1,000 times faster than broadband as it stands in Australia today, and they expect to deliver that within about three years. If they are going to do that and we have this sudden quantum leap again, where are the sources of capital going to be under the Labor model? They are going to be the government.

On the government side, we have Telstra, which would be in private hands; we have the other phone companies that contribute under the universal service obligation; and on top of that the government can contribute if it is a major step forward and there is real public need. Those options all remain in place, but not under Labor. It is no wonder that they keep on getting into strife. It is no wonder that, despite those very strong public sentiments that make people automatically want to cling to what has been in their view a relatively successful way of doing things in the past, having Telstra as a security blanket, we need to look to the future, to these real developments and to providing this level of capital, which is not going to be provided in any other way.