Mr ANDREN (9:48 PM) —The honourable member for Fisher (Mr Slipper) alludes to the 92 per cent of Telstra employees who have taken up the share offer. With the deal that was offered—a bonus one for two, as I understand it, and a time purchase arrangement—one wonders about the eight per cent who did not take it up, given that 24,000 of them have lost or are about to lose their jobs. Why wouldn't they take it up? In its explanatory memorandum to the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Bill 1998 , the government sets out its philosophic reasons for selling off the remainder of Telstra. It says:

There is no good public policy reason, nor market failure reason, for the Australian Government to continue to own a communications carrier.

It goes on:

It is intended that the further privatisation of Telstra will enhance its competitiveness and performance.

For whom does the phone ring, one might ask? The performance of a privatised Telstra will enhance the incomes of those fortunate enough to hold shares in the company. It will not enhance the services to those people in rural and remote areas who do not form part of a large competitive telephone market and who will be at the end of the line when it comes to repairs, installations and new services. Why would a privatised Telstra, for instance, outlay $100,000 to install a data line to a farm north of Bathurst, using two machines and three men for a week, without seeking full cost recovery?

Without the monitoring and control a publicly owned and operated service provides, there will be an inevitable watering down, and the universal service obligations—untimed local calls, customer service guarantees and so on—will be consigned to the pages of history as quaint political rhetoric of the 1990s. There are corporations salivating out there, waiting to get a bit of the Telstra action. This is lazy, non-productive investment, whether it be by Australian corporations or foreign—sitting like praying mantises while the golden moth of Telstra is handed to them to devour.

This government thought it a clever political move to sell off what Australians already own, but this two-thirds sell-off is not popu lar, whatever the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) might say about the mums and dads who will be able to buy a bit of the action. Mums and dads are in fact—according to Labor's figures—selling up and the corporations are moving in. Surprise, surprise! Sixty per cent of Australians opposed the first sale of Telstra and 62 per cent oppose the next sale. It is not a popular move. The government is not acting in the interests of the majority of Australians. Something as important as this should have been put to the Australian people in a referendum.

This government cannot claim a mandate to sell Telstra just because it announces it and introduces the legislation prior to an election it will probably win because people out there have got such a lousy choice—apart from in Calare and several other notable seats—including, I expect, the seat of Parkes. The member for Parkes (Mr Cobb) says he gets only one complaint a month about Telstra. I wonder why. Perhaps they are ringing me, so frustrated are they with the inability of the National Party to listen to their concerns. They gave up on Labor long ago. In this proposed Telstra sale, the government is demonstrating that it governs not for the mums and dads but for the elite, the shareholding public, the well-off, the top 30 per cent.

As Robert Manne pointed out in an article last week, the free market and economic rationalist views dominate within the economic elite but nowhere else. He rightly points out that the majority of Australians still want protection for Australian industry, generous state provisions for needs like pensions and health and still prefer government ownership of critical services—like Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, the power industry and water resources. These are the ordinary people, with ordinary expectations not based on greed but on need—dare I say the battlers?

We should not kid ourselves that this two-thirds final sell-off of Telstra is popular. It is not, and the government stands condemned. The vast bulk of proceeds from this sale will be used to retire debt. Then what? How do we pay our remaining debt and the debt that will occur in years down the track? Do we flog off the Lodge, privatise Parliament House or outsource government perhaps? We would rob future generations of an asset any country would be proud of—an asset generating a $3 billion dividend a year and a revenue stream that could fund the environmental crisis facing this country on a permanent basis.

The Murray-Darling Basin alone is an environmental time bomb. We heard this week that the Murray has stopped flowing into the ocean for the first time in 20 years. Its feeder river is salty, toxic and infested with the devastating European carp. Its cropping demands are out of kilter with the supply of water, its lands are polluted by rising water tables, its trees are dying, and the landcare and natural heritage programs are unable to keep up with the inexorable decline and degradation. Quarantining but half a billion dollars of the Telstra dividend should have been the sort of vision and forward planning needed to arrest the crisis, but this government has thrown away that opportunity. I suppose it expects market forces to repair the environment as well.

In his second reading speech the Minister for Finance and Administration and the Minister representing the Minister for Communications, the Information Economy and the Arts (Mr Fahey) cited the pro-competitive countries like the US, Great Britain, Canada and New Zealand, where private ownership coupled with robust government imposed safeguards are the norm. Ask the Brits about the benefits of privatised water supplies—increased costs and a deterioration in services. Ask the people of Auckland about corporatised power supplies. Ask the mums and dads and ordinary people of Europe, where the wave of privatisation since 1992 has cost five million jobs. Ask the people of Australia about a privatised Commonwealth Bank and its total rejection of any community service obligation in smaller country communities. It is leading the charge out of town, deserting the school savers and the pensioner clients. Profits, not people, greed, not need: that is the price of giving up control of these utilities and assets.

Let me put to rest the furphy about public ownership equating with inefficiency. The Bureau of Industry Economics has shown no association between economic indicators and the type of ownership of the main enterprises in the market. Iceland and Switzerland, for example, both have publicly owned telephony infrastructures for the moment; the former has the world's lowest business user charges while the latter has the world's best revenue per line and per employee. Competition is one thing, ownership is another. You can achieve the desired marketplace competitive advantages through proper competition alone. Keeping one of the players, whether it is a bank or an insurance company or particularly if it is the world competitive Telstra, in public ownership also serves to keep the rest of the bastards honest. So what does this government do? It sacrifices three per cent of our national revenue to the benefit of several million shareholders, inevitably large corporations and 35 per cent at the moment offshore.

The minister speaks of the customer service guarantee. Let me cite some recent examples from my own electorate. Daryl Wilson of Millthorpe requested a second line in January; Telstra was not able to install it until March. Ross Jones of Central West Smallgoods in Orange had his phone out twice for over a week. Carol Parker of Meadow Flat was told in early February that no phone was available to her mother in a nursing home until 10 March. With regard to a public phone in Sofala, out of action many times, people were told by Telstra that because it was in a remote area it could not be fixed for two weeks. In another remote area, Stuart Town, a subscriber was told that the phone would be fixed when Telstra got more problems in the area so as to make the repair trip cost effective to the company. This is under a third private ownership.

Lisa Chamberlain, a casual teacher in Orange, had her phone out for over a week despite her pleas that she needed the phone to get work offers. Anne Deane of Lithgow waited four months for a phone connection. Dr Peter Bentivoglio, who is a neurosurgeon at St Vincents, of Lue near Mudgee in the electorate of the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy (Mr Anderson), cannot be contacted in an emergency. Telstra still has not provided a mobile service to the area and he cannot get a phone on because Rylstone exchange needs to be updated. Alexandra Coffer of Rylstone said that her husband was told five times that a Telstra crew would turn up. He took five separate days off and five times Telstra failed to show up. Bernie Trainor of O'Connell, who suffers from a brain tumour, was trying to get the phone on at his rural property since June last year. Telstra delivered the cable and said, `String it out yourself, dig a ditch and bury it, and we will be back when we can.' Oberon Council lodged a complaint on 3 March and two weeks later the fault had still not been rectified. So it goes on. Public phone boxes are now to be closed—five in Rylstone shire—in remote locations where there is not even a mobile service.

Finally, there is the example of John Shepherd of Cullen Bullen. The line was laid across the ground to his farmhouse in January. His cattle tripped over it, his farm ute ran over it and no-one came to fix it. He was given some clips to fix it. It was not until A Current Affair covered his plight that some very overworked and overstressed Telstra men turned up last week, no doubt abandoning other urgent work around the state because the media had embarrassed Telstra. And Telstra had the gall to come down here to Parliament House a few weeks ago and, through its boss Frank Blount, brag about the great services it is providing in the bush, then threaten its own employees for trying to bring to public notice these problems. That is the arrogance and the community service of a one-third privatised Telstra.

The clever political ploy of a $10 million maximum fine is just that—a clever ploy. The rigmarole alone required for a consumer to validate any complaint will be enough to deter anyone from taking on the giant, privatised Telstra.

The government has only belatedly taken on board the criticisms from the bush about the lack of community service, the appalling attention to breakdowns and the delays. I gave senior Telstra management a list of over two dozen complaints on 16 February. They promised me in the local media that they would personally deal with them all. A month later, when I and my staff checked on the complainants, there had been no word from Telstra. The company said it was dealing with the list but had not realised that it promised to contact the people to apologise.

The Minister Representing the Minister for Communications, the Information Economy and the Arts, detailed the Telstra performance in the House last week, spelling out in detail the very reasons why Telstra should not be privatised. Let me remind you of the report from the Australian Communications Authority:

Results for the provision of new services on or before the agreed commitment date declined for all customer categories and, in particular, performance for country customers declined by 9 percentage points.

It went on:

Performance for restoration of service and fault reporting indicators once again declined during the December 1997 quarter, with country customers suffering the most.

There we have it; CSO now means city services only, just as it applies to Optus, Vodafone and those other providers interested only in the lucrative pickings of the big return markets. In a recent article, James Cook University's John Quiggin says:

. . . the benefits of such a sale to the budget line would disappear in five years . . . leaving us without the enormous financial and social benefits the retention of Telstra in public hands would provide.

Quiggin says that, relative to the alternative of retaining ownership, there has not been one major privatisation in Australia where the government has made a profit. The Australian taxpayer has been ripped off, to put it mildly—and in Telstra's case enormously so, given the value placed by the market on the share.

One of the major concerns about this proposal is that the government expects that, by implementing a series of penalties, it can ensure that the people of rural Australia will be adequately served by communications carriers. It is a totally absurd suggestion because, as we know, there are already a series of minimum standards and penalties in place—but already the people of regional Australia are being left behind.

Peter and Helen Muller have a small farm in an isolated area north of Bathurst. Their kids are educated through the Distance Education School based at Dubbo. They have four kids under the age of six, and already the eldest are missing out on an adequate education because they do not have access to a decent phone line—just 50 kilometres north of Bathurst. And, under this arrangement, Telstra still meets its universal service obligations. The Mullers have an old copper wire leading to their property, but it cannot handle fax or data.

Just stop for one second and ask yourself why governments became involved in providing telegraph and telephone services in the first place. Private operators in the sector are not new; private companies have been involved in delivering these sorts of services since they were first invented. But the reason government took control of this sector in Australia was to ensure that all Australians had equal access to the service.

In fact, the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1905 ensured that the Postmaster General was given exclusive rights of establishing, erecting, maintaining and using stations and appliances for the purpose of transmitting and receiving messages by wireless telegraphy—assuming control, as he did, of systems that had been set up by private operators between capital cities from as early as 1854. As long ago as 1859, cable was laid across Bass Strait from Victoria to Launceston—in those days a tremendous achievement—to link Tasmania into a growing nationwide network. And last week the minister asked in the other house why Telstra should be expected to provide a basic service to Hobart—not Bullamakanka, which will never get it, but Hobart.

Market forces did not build our communications infrastructure; national pride, determination, creativity, research, government guidance, and public need and interest certainly did. I ask the government—in particular, members representing rural and regional seats—what has really changed since those first colonies clustered around the harbours and inlets of our vast coastline?

The last time I looked Australia was still one of the most urbanised countries in the world. The people of rural Australia still, in many respects, are second-class citizens when it comes to gaining access to all-important transport and communications infrastructure—or, for that matter, any government service. I say to any country member who supports this privatisation: you are betraying the rural constituency you represent; you are putting conservative Thatcherist ideology ahead of what deep down you must surely know is in the best interests of the people of rural Australia.

The mobile phones most of us take for granted today seemed like science fiction toys a little more than 20 years ago. Who would have thought back in the seventies when Telecom was carved out of the PMG that today it would be one of Australia's biggest companies perhaps worth more than $50 billion? Who knows what it will be worth in 20 years time?

But there are a few things that are certain. Telstra will eventually become foreign owned and controlled, whatever assurances are given now. There will probably be but five telecommunications giants worldwide within 15 years. Country people will not have access to telecommunication services of the standards they require. The Commonwealth will forgo billions of dollars in revenue that will end up in the hands of those wealthy enough to become shareholders, including the current and soon to grow 35 per cent of foreign owners. Our grandchildren will ask why their forefathers sold those magnificent enterprises that were owned by all Australians, served all Australians and benefited all Australians.

They sold the Commonwealth Bank, the Labor Party; they sold Qantas, the Labor Party; and they sold Telstra, the coalition. They are both guilty. And now they have sold out Australia—especially the bush.