Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thought for a fleeting moment then that Senator Birmingham was going to start to outline a policy that the opposition have. He nearly got there. He nearly started to say what they would do if they were in government, but he then backed away from it at a million miles an hour. In his contribution to the debate today he talked about a so-called government hoax and about so-called government hidden agendas. He even had the audacity to complain about us having a policy when we were in opposition. That stands in stark contrast to the present opposition, which has no policy, which does not seem to want to develop one and which does not seem to want to have a debate with the government about competing ideas of policy. They simply want to bag what the government is going to do.

The closest the opposition have come to having a policy is what Senator Coonan, the former communications minister, said to the Communications Day, a local industry magazine, on 13 May 2008. I know Senator Conroy quoted some of this, but I want to go through it because Senator Coonan got up and said that she did not say what Senator Conroy had said she had said. It is in the format where questions were put to the former minister and then detailed answers were provided. It is inconceivable that an interview of that nature would not be double-checked by the person giving the interview. If Senator Coonan wants to stand by the statement she has made in the Senate today, she should do so. But if she has in fact misled the Senate then she should come back in here and correct the record.

This is what the magazine article actually says. The magazine puts the question:

If you could have your time in the portfolio again, what would you do differently?

Senator Coonan says a number of things and then says:

… more thought could have gone into a policy that would have separated the network and would have looked down the track at what might happen if you turned a publicly-owned monopoly into potentially a privately owned one.

It was not as if those comments were discreetly tucked away somewhere; they actually ended up being the headline banner. The headline banner on the article, which had a nice picture of Senator Coonan next to it, is ‘More thought could have gone into a policy that would have separated the network’.

We take that article at face value. When we link that back into the policy development that the opposition seems negligent in going through, Senator Coonan seems to be the closest one in acknowledging that the previous government actually got it wrong. When they went through the privatisation process they did not look to the future, they did not understand how Telstra would act—