Senator LEES (11:23 AM) —I rise to speak on the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill 2003. I opposed the first two part sales of Telstra primarily because I believed that the essential infrastructure should remain in public hands. At the very least, the wires, cables, towers, satellites et cetera should have remained a discrete part of Telstra and should have remained in their entirety in public hands. However, the sale of those first two tranches of Telstra means that our major telecommunications provider is now a scrambled egg. We are forced to look to the future as to what we can do with what we have left.

There is no doubt that the government has an important role to play in ensuring that all Australians have access to affordable, up-to-date telecommunication services, regardless of where they live in this vast country. There is no reason why private companies should not operate services using the wires, cables, towers, satellites et cetera, but this does not and must not relieve any provider—not just whoever owns Telstra—from its obligation to ensure the provision of adequate customer services to all of us.

The sale of the remainder of Telstra is a serious issue and before we even consider it we need a great deal more information and a great deal more time. It is clear that there are a range of specific problem areas that need to be addressed before Telstra is ready to be sold. I will go through those areas quickly in my time today. The first area is Telstra's size—its market dominance. Telstra almost remains in total control of the customer access network. It can cross-subsidise if it so wishes one area of its operation and, indeed, unfairly compete in another.

I note from evidence before the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Legislation Committee inquiry that AAPT, Primus Telecom, Optus, as well as the Telecommunications Users Group, ATUG, were not opposed to further privatisation but all were concerned about Telstra's market dominance and the impact on them because of that unequal, unlevel playing field. I ask: does the government support the ATUG and its suggestions for much improved ACCC and ACA involvement? I have argued before and I continue to believe that there is a need for an unbiased, nonpoliticised and rigorous analysis of what it would mean if we split Telstra—that is, sell the retail arm, maintain the infrastructure and public ownership as I have just talked about. This position is supported by one of Australia's leading communications analysts, Paul Budde, in his submission to the Senate inquiry. This position is also supported by a report this year from CEDA, the Council for Economic Development, which stated:

It is disappointing that neither the government nor the opposition are willing to commit to such an analysis, even though the notion was raised by the opposition spokesperson for telecommunications before he was shut down. I turn to the second issue: complaints against Telstra. They are increasing, not decreasing and customer satisfaction is falling. The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman's research this year found complaints against Telstra rose by about three per cent, while overall complaints in the industry dropped by about 11 per cent. Is the government concerned about this? Is the government concerned that consumer satisfaction with Telstra fell from 74 per cent to 60 per cent in 2002? One's memory does not have to be tested too vigorously to remember Telstra's recent Big Pond fiasco, so I do not intend to argue that the current structure is a panacea. But Telstra's explanation about the Big Pond problem was, in my opinion, wholly inadequate. The compensation offered to its 1½ million customers was laughable. I believe that people are incredulous to read Telstra's CEO saying, `Telstra had just come to the realisation in 2003 that email was mission-critical for Australian businesses.'

I turn now to the issue of the customer service guarantee. I believe that this must be stronger and broader and that universal service obligations must be upgraded regularly. They must be locked in and it has to happen automatically. As a result of the sale of 49.9 per cent of Telstra, we now have a large, dominant national telecommunications company with internally competing priorities. On the one hand, they have to maximise profits for the shareholders and, on the other hand, they have to provide services in areas where, at best, profits are marginal, if they exist at all. The pressure is on them to do as little as they absolutely have to do. We have to have a mechanism, a system built into this legislation for customer service that prevents any straying away from making sure that affordable and quality access is indeed fully and completely national. For people in rural and regional areas, as we have sadly learnt this year, access to telecommunications can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. People in rural areas already face difficulties in accessing a range of services. I do not have to go through these, but I just mention education, health, banking and transport. A good Internet service with affordable and timely access to a good telecommunications system could help reduce these inequalities. The market will not do it, as shareholders will not let companies run any part of the business at a loss. So the government has to be involved in very tough regulation in the long term.

Australians need access to e-health, e-education, e-banking et cetera. The more remote you are, the further away you are, the greater their importance but the less likely you are, at the moment, to have access to them. To quote from a paper prepared for the National Rural Health Alliance:

Unfortunately, that is frequently not there. In New South Wales the government has contracted a private operator, who has moved away from Telstra, to put broadband access into its schools. Again I highlight the fact that ownership is not the critical issue—it is ensuring that those services get out there.

In my opinion, the most important issues regarding customer service guarantees are that they have to be broad enough, they have to be strong enough, and they have to be locked in over the future. We have to look over the horizon at what is coming to make sure that people in all parts of Australia benefit as technology moves ahead. We have to make sure that if Telstra is privatised, those obligations cannot be worked out of, that companies cannot find any way of shedding their obligations.

Significant groups of Australians such as Indigenous communities have major problems accessing even basic phone services, not to mention Internet access, which is vital for them. Remote Indigenous communities frequently struggle to get basic phone lines. They are well outside the mobile network system and they cannot get the bandwidth for e-health or e-education. They should be able, under current programs, to access this through the remote access regime, but it seems that many still cannot. So I ask the government to conduct a full inventory and make sure that it covers completely all Indigenous communities and assesses what their access is to these essential services.

Costs for Australians are very high by international standards. We are paying more to get in touch by phone with our families and our banks than people in most other industrialised countries. Simply capping increases is not the answer. We need to look at the overall level of fees and charges, and perhaps set some international benchmarks. I ask the government to make some comments as to how they feel we can bring down overall prices for telecommunications services.

Another issue highlighted in the committee's report on Telstra is the reduced investment in research and development. We cannot just leave this to overseas companies. All our telcos have to be locked into R&D. We do not want to be left importing technology, much of which may not even be appropriate for Australian conditions, anyway.

The issue of faults and poor maintenance, or lack of maintenance, perhaps has generated the most emails, letters and phone calls to my office as we put Telstra back on the agenda in this place this week. The worsening staff situation in Telstra, the reduction in jobs, is certainly not helping this. Given the evidence before the Senate committee and certainly the complaints I hear as I travel in rural South Australia, this is an issue that the government has to tackle head-on. I acknowledge that there has been some substantial improvement. The Estens inquiry and report showed this. Particularly, I note that a lot of farmers and small business are now saying they have better access, but we still have a long way to go. Many people believe that these improvements have been driven, not by a genuine desire on the part of Telstra and the government to improve services, but rather by the government's desire to sell the rest of Telstra. So let us keep the pressure on.

Finally and most importantly, any future sale must make economic sense. The government's debt argument is fundamentally flawed. Australia has one of the lowest levels of public sector debt in the OECD. At the same time as we face low debt levels, Australia faces many serious environmental emergencies, plus the issue of run-down and inadequate infrastructure. To sell a cash cow that is making a lot of money makes no sense at all if we get no substantial benefit. This government's obsession with paying off debt has seen it pay off $66.6 billion so far. I liken this to the practice of a family that decides that it has to pay off its mortgage, but at the expense of not being able to feed, clothe and properly educate the children.

Australians know that the debt building up in this country is very much an environmental one, not a fiscal one. If the remaining part of Telstra is to be sold eventually—and I think eventually it will be—there is more than enough that we need to do urgently with the money. South Australians certainly understand the need to clean up the Murray Darling Basin. At some times of the year it becomes little more than a salinised drainage system, and we know that the Murray is dying. We only have to look at the red gums along the river to know the pressure it is under. The wetlands and the bird life are under stress. Invasive and exotic species are spreading.

We need a national biodiversity action plan, and this will cost money. Any national biodiversity strategy must support farmers who are working to enhance biodiversity on their properties. Action such as ending land clearing of native vegetation and then revegetating, particularly for salinity control, will save public money in the longer term. What is missing in our national environment strategy is a biodiversity plan that encompasses all the management and protection needs across the whole of the country for biodiversity—a plan with a high profile, a plan that is a high priority—a plan that needs lots of money. It is a glaring gap in our national environmental tool kit—a plan managed by the environment portfolio. A key part of this plan must be the restoration of the health and biodiversity of the Murray Darling Basin.

To look at infrastructure issues, in its 2003-04 pre-budget submission, the Australian Industry Group emphasised its belief that the time is right for significant investment in key infrastructure projects in this country. The AIG commends the strong economic position we are in and our low public sector debt levels, but argues that the government must `boost the quality of our urban and regional transport networks and accelerate the restoration of our rivers and water catchment areas'.

I call on the government to make these a real priority. Achieving these nation-building goals will not be cheap. It is no good throwing a few million here and another million over there. To make a real difference, the proceeds of any future sale of Telstra, should it go ahead, must be devoted to achieving these goals. Future proofing Australia will not be achieved by selling off our public phone system to retire debt.

Thanks to numerous governments, including Labor governments at state and federal level, the Australian public is very dubious about the benefits for consumers of privatisation of services such as water, buses, electricity, banking and airlines. The ALP does not have clean hands here and it is well within the realms of possibility that in government the ALP would sell Telstra in whole or in part. If only Labor had put consumer service obligations in place when it rushed to get the money from the sale of the Commonwealth Bank, many Australians, particularly those in rural and regional areas, would still have some face-to-face banking services and would not have lost those services. If it had put customer service obligations in place when it sold the airlines, we would still have regional airline services supported across Australia. There are certainly some there now, but I believe we would not have had the hiccups and the problems we have had if there had been CSOs in place.

In South Australia we have seen power prices jump 30 to 35 per cent, when we were told that privatisation would result in cheaper electricity. So you can see why people are sceptical. I believe that perhaps the biggest problem this government has with the privatisation of Telstra is that Australians believe there is a direct link between public ownership and the guaranteed levels of affordable, quality services. Judging from the results of opinion polls, Australians still believe that public ownership equates to equity and quality, affordable services. So the government has a challenge ahead of it when it comes to changing the minds of 70 to 80 per cent of the electorate on this issue.

Ever since entering this chamber 14 years ago I have made a commitment to consider the environmental, social and environmental impact of every issue. So I say to government: I am happy to listen; I am prepared to examine the issues, but you have an enormous amount of work to do. Given my home state's water problems and reliance on the Murray, for instance, I would be derelict in my duty if I did not look at every possible opportunity to get the money that we really do need to clean up the Murray-Darling Basin.

However, it seems we are going to be pushed to a vote this week, and I will be voting no. This bill has been brought on too quickly and too close to the last Senate report that has just been released. For those of us who are prepared to keep going through these issues and looking at these issues, those not locked into an ideological position, we need more time and we need more resources to examine all of these issues properly. So this week I will vote against the sale of any more of Telstra. There are simply too many problems that have to be dealt with. Too many Australians are fearful of losing—or never getting—access to high-quality, affordable services, whether they be fixed telephony services, mobile services, dial-up Internet access or, in particular, broadband access. I do not think we can keep classifying that as a luxury; it is becoming more and more an essential.

And of course that other debate about what we do with the money, what we do with $33 billion to $35 billion, is not happening. We must have that public debate, the debate in this chamber and the other chamber, to look at what we can do to make a real difference to our national rail network, for example, and particularly to the Murray-Darling Basin. If the government wants to talk seriously about future proofing Australia—that is, creating a sustainable future for all of us—I am happy to listen. If it is prepared to work through the issues I have raised and ensure that all of us on the crossbenches are able to access unbiased, independent advice on all these issues, I am more than happy to listen.