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

The new leader, Mr Rudd, described retaining Telstra in public ownership as core Labor policy. Even after T3, Labor promised they would not sell another single Telstra share. So Labor’s policy, up until Tuesday, was to force the Future Fund to retain in perpetuity all of its Telstra shares. That was the policy: to force the fund to retain every single share. Today, two days later, the policy is to force the fund to sell all the shares and hand the cash over to a future Labor government. As the Treasurer quite properly said yesterday, this is probably the most irresponsible economic policy that Labor has come up with in its 11 long years of opposition.