Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You may well ask, Senator Bernardi. It was none other than Kim Beazley, the present Leader of the Opposition. Now, if he was right in 1994 about those sorts of assets in that context, he is right about them today. As we well know, the then Labor government talked seriously in the early 1990s about divesting itself of Telstra and doing exactly what this government is doing today. If you do not believe that is the case, tell us how you were going to sell Telstra differently to the way in which it is being sold today.

The fact is that countries all over the world have realised that it is bad public policy for them as governments to be in the business of owning major operations, major corporate entities, which compete in marketplaces where government ownership represents a fundamental conflict of interest. It is simply not tenable to retain that kind of involvement. The particular volatility of the telecommunications market makes it imperative that governments not be involved as owners of businesses of that kind. In almost any other industry you could get away with holding back on privatisation, but, of all the marketplaces affecting Australian businesses at the moment, telecommunications is surely the most volatile and surely the last that governments should be involved in as shareholders.

Countries like Cuba and China are in the process of selling down, or have already sold down, their shares in their telecommunications companies—even countries like those. There are very few countries in the world today where you will find government owned telecommunications enterprises—very few. But that mob over there think that Australia should be one of the few to retain that kind of ownership. We do not. We think it is vitally important that we protect the value of the Australian public’s assets. We want to put that money in the Future Fund. We want to protect the value of those assets and make sure that the Australian community is protected. (Time expired)