Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy President, I appreciate your indulgence. Today’s announcement by the government of its policy of forcing the break-up of Telstra contradicts everything that the government has said, to this point, whether as an opposition or as a government. It certainly contradicts what the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy said as recently as the May estimates and what former spokesmen in this area have said.

The Labor Party never told the Australian people when it went to the last election that after it got elected it would sneak through the forced break-up of Telstra. It has never been Labor policy to propose the forced break-up of Telstra. Indeed, as we all know, it was the Labor Party, when in government back in the early 90s, that actually created Telstra—this company which it now says is too big and too much of a monster and has to be broken up by force of law. This is their creation. At no point since then have they dared to suggest that they would want to see this company broken up by force of law.

The government will, of course, go on pretending that it is not about forcing the break-up, but it is evident from the statement made today that the government intends to hold a cannon—not merely a handgun, but a cannon—to the head of Telstra to force it to behave in the fashion which this Labor government wants to dictate to it. This is a radical and risky policy which the Labor Party has announced today. This is a company which employs 30,000 Australians. This is the Labor Party which professes a concern for employees—there are 30,000 in this company who are now being put at risk by this policy.

There are 1.4 million shareholders. We know the Labor Party totally opposed the sale, but apparently this is the punishment that mums and dads of Australia who bought shares in this company are now having meted out to them by the Labor Party. Today, already, within minutes of the government making this announcement, the mums and dads of Australia who own shares in this company have seen $2 billion wiped off the value of their shares by this government.

This company has nine million customers. This company is critical to the telecommunications infrastructure of Australia, but this risky, radical and careless government is now going to adopt Telstra as its plaything. Why break up this company? Why take all this risk if, indeed, the government is serious about building a national broadband network? The government says that it wants to borrow up to $43 billion to roll out, right across Australia, a whole new optical fibre network—fibre to the premises—to service 90 per cent of Australian homes in order to provide them with a new wholesale-only, fixed-line network to compete with Telstra. If the problem with Telstra is that it is this so-called monopoly—which of course it no longer is—that we cannot have and must break up, why on earth would you do that if you were going to build a $43 billion telecommunications network to compete with it?

The question the government has got to ask today is: why is it undertaking this radical and risky policy if it is serious about building this network? What we see today is the government itself implicitly accepting that its $43 billion NBN is pie in the sky. It knows that this is a radical and risky proposal which it has put on the desk, that it will never be able to raise the money, that this will never be commercially viable and that there are so many questions about this NBN that it simply cannot answer. And the money that is going out the door on this NBN is unbelievable—a CEO being paid $40,000 a week to run a company which has no employees, no revenue, no customers and no nothing!