Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank honourable senators for their contribution to the debate. I understand the opposition will be supporting the bill, although listening to them you might have thought they would not be. It is good that they are supporting the bill, so I will not delay the Senate unnecessarily. I remind honourable senators that this is the Long Service Leave (Commonwealth Employees) Amendment Bill 2006. We have traversed a few other areas, but allow me to respond. Telstra employees currently accrue long service leave entitlements under the Long Service Leave (Commonwealth Employees) Act 1976. Long service leave entitlements accrued up to the date that the Commonwealth ceases to have a controlling interest in Telstra are already protected by the Telstra (Transition to Full Private Ownership) Act 2005, or the transition act. Telstra has requested that it be allowed to remain under the Long Service Leave (Commonwealth Employees) Act for a further three years, and the government has agreed to meet that request. Suggestions to the effect that the government, or rather taxpayers, ought to be paying for the entitlements accrued by Telstra employees post sale are simply untenable.

The Minister for Finance and Administration has previously announced that the government would not be maintaining Commonwealth superannuation coverage of Telstra employees after Telstra is sold. That approach is consistent with that taken regarding other privatisations, including those promoted by the previous government. It is worthwhile noting and reminding those senators who would seek to take us back to the future with some of their speeches that they really want to go back even before the Hawke-Keating regimes and still believe in a degree of public ownership that even the Hawke-Keating governments were not prepared to accept. Indeed, Senator Moore’s contribution, sincere though it was, did not make it right. Her sincere approach unfortunately overlooked the fact that her party presided over the sale of the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and CSL. Why did her Labor Party do that if they were so strongly of the view that privatisation was not a good thing? Is she now asserting to the Australian people that the Hawke-Keating governments acted against the best interests of the Australian people?

I believe that the Hawke-Keating governments acted in the best interests of the Australian people at that time, and that is why we as an opposition supported the then Labor government. It is just a pity, now the tables have been turned, that the Labor Party cannot, whilst in opposition, show the same degree of graciousness and the same degree of national interest as we were able to show when we were in opposition and supported the government through some of these very difficult decisions.

These decisions are never easy to sell, especially in circumstances where people like Senator Moore very cleverly seek to slip into the debate the loss of a few jobs—not a few jobs, a couple of hundred jobs—in call centres in their home state of Queensland. That is very unfortunate; it is unfortunately part and parcel of the modern world that people’s jobs are not always as secure as we might want them to be. But, while she lamented the couple of hundred jobs lost just recently in Queensland, she was strangely silent about the thousands of jobs that were literally stripped out of Telstra while guess who was minister for communications for a very short period of time? It was none other than Mr Beazley. Those jobs were stripped out of Telstra whilst it was still under full public ownership.

Public ownership of itself does not guarantee job security, so it is a fraction mischievous of the honourable senator opposite to try to somehow link privatisation to job shedding in Telstra. I would have thought she knew—and if she does not, she knows now courtesy of this contribution—that, whilst in full public ownership, her current Leader of the Opposition presided over the mass loss of jobs in Telstra.

Maintaining Commonwealth long service leave coverage for a short transitional period has no cost implications for the Commonwealth. Maintaining Commonwealth superannuation coverage of former Telstra employees for an indefinite period would be at a cost to the Australian taxpayer. As Minister Minchin advised the Senate on 11 October:

The Commonwealth is clearly entirely within its rights—as was the then Labor government—to stop membership of the CSS.

That is, the Commonwealth Superannuation Scheme. He continued:

Once the company is in majority private hands, that responsibility should no longer fall on taxpayers but on the new owners of the business.

Telstra employees will retain their accrued benefits under the Commonwealth Superannuation Scheme up to the date of sale. Those benefits will be paid in accordance with the rules of the scheme and the superannuation regulatory regime. The Australian government has already paid out in full its liabilities to Telstra super, which happens to be a total of $3.125 billion. When the Australian government majority ownership of Telstra ceases, superannuation arrangements for Telstra employees will be a matter for Telstra and its workforce. I commend the bill to the Senate, and I suggest the Senate oppose the second reading amendment.

Question put:

That the amendment (Senator Sherry’s) be agreed to.