Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

As I said before, the reason the company is in this position of having 50 per cent of its shares owned by the government is the recalcitrance of those opposite, who have fought forever against freeing up this company from government ownership. Telstra is the great symbol of the wasted years of Labor’s opposition. They have wasted 10 years in opposition. All they can do on a policy front is oppose anything that the government proposes. The government has been committed to—and has won four elections on the back of—a platform of selling all the remaining government shares in Telstra, and that has been opposed by the Labor Party on every occasion all the way through.

To the extent that anyone can complain about the possibility of some share overhang, that is what you have as a result of the Labor Party refusing to agree in 1999 to the full sale of the Telstra shares. We should be in a position now where this company is entirely free of the government shareholdings so there is no share overhang. But it was the Labor Party in this place which refused to allow the government, the legislative authority, to sell all its remaining shares at that time. As a result taxpayers are $50 billion worse off.