Senator IAN MACDONALD (Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) (4:49 PM) —First of all, I congratulate my colleague Senator Conroy on his speech. It was very eloquent, it had some pathos, humour and a bit of entertainment, and it was very well delivered. In fact, as with many of the things that you do, Senator Conroy, it would justify you a spot on Good News Week, The Panel or perhaps even the Humphrey B. Bear Show. It was a pretty good speech—congratulations. But when it comes to substance, any new ideas and any policy, there was absolutely zilch—not a thing. There was not a bit of substance in it whatsoever. It was great on delivery, entertainment and humour and it was eloquent and brilliant but, on substance, nil; new policy, nil; new ideas; nil. Hypocrisy: well, you would score pretty well on that. It was full of hypocrisy, coming from someone in the Labor Party. You cannot be visited with all of the ills of your predecessors, but you are a member of a party which has shown the greatest hypocrisy possible in relation to rural and regional Australia.

Let us reflect on what has happened today and on some of the things that have been said in question time. Let us have a look at the question of jobs for Telstra. Senator Conroy, you would be aware that under Mr Beazley's stewardship between 1991 and 1994 the Labor government of the time owned all of Telstra. What happened? There were 17,000 job losses in Telstra under Mr Beazley's stewardship. For you and your colleagues to come in today and talk about Telstra and job losses is the height of hypocrisy. Mr Beazley, by allowing it, shows yet again that he is a weak and puerile leader. He is unable to overcome his past. In fact, from 1991 to 1994, he not only predicted that 17,000 jobs in Telstra would go in the following few years under his stewardship but also said that it would be an ongoing thing. Of course, it is Mr Beazley, the greater privatiser. His biographer, Peter FitzSimons, said:

The times had changed and the Labor Party was full of selling all these enterprises. I want to come to the Commonwealth Bank later because it is mentioned in your motion, Senator Conroy, but first can I digress again.

I say not to you personally, Senator, but to your party that it is full of hypocrisy. You talk about the loss of banking services in rural and regional Australia, but in 1995 in the time of your Labor government CUSCAL, the Commonwealth Credit Union Services Corporation, found that there were 600 rural towns in Australia with populations of between 200 and 5,000 inhabitants which did not have a financial institution within 40 kilometres of the town. What did your government do in 13 years about that? Absolutely nothing. Mr Beazley rabbited on about post offices down in Burnie the other day, but during the term of the last Labor government 277 post office outlets were closed by the Labor Party and not one skerrick of action was taken. Two hundred and seventy-seven postal outlets disappeared from the face of the earth. That has not happened under our government, and our government has guaranteed to maintain the existing number of post offices.

A lot of good things have been done for rural and regional Australia. We have the rural transaction centre program, which I will go on to in some detail shortly. It provided $70 million for services to regional Australia. What was the Labor Party's attitude towards that? Oppose it. Oppose it tooth and nail. Fight against it so that that program cannot provide services to rural and regional Australia. We have provided for expanded mobile phone coverage in rural and regional Australia. What was the Labor Party's attitude? Oppose it—and you did it in the chamber. This government is providing untimed local calls within the outer extended zones in remote Australia, but what were the Labor Party's actions? Oppose it. We are providing access to the Internet at local calls rates for all Australians. What is the Labor Party's proposal? Oppose it. We are providing $45 million to get local government online, much of it in rural and regional Australia. The Labor Party's approach? Oppose it.

The Labor Party have opposed all of the good ideas and good initiatives that we have provided for rural and regional Australia, and Mr Beazley is a weak leader because he cannot stop his party voting against those particular initiatives. The Labor Party and their leader demonstrate their hypocrisy by their actions in government. It is all very well to come along here and criticise, but in government when they had 13 years of opportunity jobs left the bush, services left the bush, banks left the bush, post offices left the bush, and the Labor Party did absolutely nothing about it at all.

Senator, you have included some criticism of the Commonwealth Bank. Of course, the Commonwealth Bank was the great institution which Mr Beazley was never going to sell. Do you remember Mr Beazley's approach to those things? He guaranteed that the Labor Party would not sell the Commonwealth Bank. Of course, once the election was over, Mr Beazley was instrumental in selling the Commonwealth Bank, and in selling the Commonwealth Bank he allowed the Commonwealth Bank to cut services in rural and regional Australia and to stop jobs there. Mr Beazley said on the Lateline program on 9 May 1995:

There is Mr Beazley promoting the sale of the Commonwealth Bank, but the senator comes in here today and has the hide to criticise the Commonwealth Bank and to call upon the government to immediately begin discussions to establish a social charter of community obligations for Australia's bank.

Why didn't the Labor Party do that when they sold the Commonwealth Bank? They had every opportunity to do it then. They could have made it a condition of the sale of the Commonwealth Bank as we have made community service obligations an obligation of Telstra. Labor had that ability when they sold the Commonwealth Bank and yet took no action whatsoever to do that.

The motion talks about rural transaction centres, and that is what I want to concentrate on. We have provided $70 million for that program over four years, as we promised before the election and as we provided in our first budget. It was dependent upon the sale of the second tranche of Telstra which—because the Labor Party opposed it, because they fought it tooth and nail at every stage—took longer to get through than we had hoped. The government provided funds in the last budget to go towards the rural transaction centre program even though, at that time, parliament had not agreed to sell the second tranche of Telstra. So we provided the money as we said we would, even though the Labor Party and the Democrats made it as difficult as possible for us to do it.

Since then, we have got the guidelines together. We have announced the project. Currently, we have 13 projects either in operation or about to be opened—that is 13 in a very short time, which is a great record. This program has attracted a great deal of interest right across rural and regional Australia. The number of inquiries we have had reaches into the thousands. As well as those 13 actual projects—buildings and centres either opened or under way—we have already funded 56 business plans for local communities.

We are providing the wherewithal for communities to get a business plan together and to get in a broker. We give them a list of brokers. They do not have to choose one of ours; they can use their own broker, and many of them have used their own. But we provide the money for them to get a broker to come in, to talk to the community, to do the hard work, to do the legwork, to find out which services each community wants, to find out which service provider each community wants in their town and then to put the application together. It then comes to the government, it is dealt with by an independent panel that I have set up to help me assess these applications and then—once the guidelines are met, and they are pretty simple guidelines—the Commonwealth provides the wherewithal to set up rural transaction centres.

Already, we have assisted 13 communities. We have benefited another 66 towns with 56 business plans. That is a total of 79 communities in regional Australia that have never had these services in recent times looking towards getting those services into their communities. Some 45 applications have been received for the next round of the RTC program, and the advisory panel will be meeting on 16 March to consider those applications. They work very well and very speedily. They will get recommendations to me within a couple of weeks after that. I hope that, by the end of March or early April, we will have announced quite a number more rural transaction centres to be opened or business plans to be provided. Senator Conroy asked me to list all of the communities that have been assisted, and well he would like me to, because that would take up the rest of my speaking time. But the list is there, and it is always available to anyone who wishes to see it. The details are all there.

What is Labor's alternative to the rural transaction centres? I do not know that they have an alternative. Mr Beazley, in his major statement on regional services—down in your area, Acting Deputy President Watson—the other day said, `They're a pretty good idea.' He said, `The government's doing a lot of good work on those.' It might be a bit like the GST. They criticise it initially, and then they say, `Oh, it's not a bad idea.' The Labor Party now support the GST—in a rolled back form, which we are uncertain about. All we know about their rolling back is that they will be rolling back the income tax cuts that this government is giving. The Labor Party now support the GST and it appears that, after criticising the rural transaction centre program, they are now going to support that. But Mr Beazley says that he has a better way. He says that he is going to do something with post offices. I repeat that 277 post offices closed in Labor times. But now Mr Beazley is going to do something about it. His new policy announcement was just breathtaking in its shallowness.

Senator IAN MACDONALD —Senator Mackay, you were not there to help him along when he made this announcement.

Senator Abetz —She did all the work!

Senator IAN MACDONALD —She did all the work, but she was not there.

Senator Mackay —I was there!

Senator IAN MACDONALD —I thought you were up in Canberra that day.

Senator Mackay —I was in Launceston, and I was standing right next to Mr Beazley.

Senator IAN MACDONALD —I thought you were doing something in Canberra that day. But that is even worse: if you were there, you should have told him about it. Mr Beazley came out and said that post offices are excluded from the rural transaction centre program. Senator, I have told you time and time again to please go to St Marys. It is in your own home state. It is not all that far away. You would not have to take too much time out of dealing with the unions or whatever you do in your daily life. Go to St Marys in Tasmania, and you will see the post office there with the RTC. If you ever get up to western Queensland, have a look at Aramac, and you will see the RTC in the post office building. So, please, in the future, do not mislead Mr Beazley. I know he is weak. I know he is pretty useless. He could use your help. Please tell him the facts: post offices are not excluded.

Senator Mackay, this is what the Labor Party cannot get through their heads: you have this prescriptive approach to government. You think you can sit here in Canberra and tell rural communities what is best for them because you know best—you are university educated; you have made a success of your life; you can tell these regional communities what is best for them—but we do not work like that. We say to the regional community and to the rural town, `You tell us what you want. You tell us who you want to provide that, and we will provide you with the funds to do what your community wants to do.' If the community wants to put in a post office, as two have done, then we will fund it. But if the community wants to put in something else, then that is the community's choice—not Big Brother sitting here in Canberra telling the community what it should do.

I will return to Mr Beazley's proposal for post offices. He had no idea what he was going to do, so he said, `Look, we will put in some health and employment information government services there. That will be our new policy.' He said that after a bit of prompting from the media. Of course, that already applies in the rural transaction centres. Mr Beazley was then prompted by the media again, and the media said to him, `What about social security?' He replied, `Oh, yes, social security, we'll do that again,' little knowing—you should have told him, Senator—that that is already part of the rural transaction centre program. When he was asked by the media whether his program for post offices was fully costed, he said, `Fully costed, look, it will be. We'll tell you all about this some time later.' To cap it off, when he was asked about his new policy for post offices, he said this:

So that is his policy: he does not really know but he will talk to some people who are expert in Australia Post to tell us what that means. He said, `We're going to put some cyber café sort of things in the post office.' Again, Senator Mackay, if you go to some of these rural transaction centres, you will see that is what it is all about—it is all there. That is the Labor Party policy.

I had a lot more that I wanted to say but I will be leaving that to Senator Troeth and Senator McGauran when they speak later on. Before I close, I want to say you could not fault Senator Conroy's eloquence, but what are Labor's policies? What proposals do they have for Australia? We know what their past record is, because regional and rural Australia was decimated under the Labor government. We know what their eloquence now talks about in those areas, but what are their policies; what are their proposals? I see Senator Mackay is on the speakers list, so I am sure she will be able to elaborate for us what the Labor Party policy is about: `Beginning discussions to establish a social charter of community obligations for Australia's banks.' She will be able to explain that in detail, explain what the Labor Party are going to do, how it is going to work, who they are going to speak with, what consultation they have embarked on, what the banks think about it, what the communities think about it—we will expect all that because we want to know and the Australian public want to know.

We know what you are going to do to post offices. I hope the first thing that Mr Beazley does is to stop shutting them down, because he shut them down when he was there. We know what that is about, but tell us what your regional services policy is, because we are desperate to learn. The Australian public is desperate to learn. You can see what we are doing; we are actually doing it. We are providing services. I wish I had time to read the letters I have received from the communities that have rural transaction centres and what great things they have done for those towns. Tell us what you are going to do, Senator; that is what we need. (Time expired)