Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to comment on the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Competition and Consumer Safeguards) Bill 2009, which is a long way of saying ‘a bill for the structural separation of Telstra’. I place on record, in response to a question asked earlier by a senator from across the chamber, that when Labor came to government I took the wise decision of selling the Telstra shares that were under my control. Since I have been in this place, the evidence I have seen has served only to reinforce the wisdom of that particular decision.

When I came into this place I watched very carefully and was most interested to hear the comments of Minister Conroy. When asked about a business plan for the new NBN, he very proudly said to us, ‘There is no business plan.’ Coming from a business background and also a government executive background, I was somewhat dumbfounded and I thought perhaps he was joking. But, in fact, he was not joking. He was very pleased and very proud of the fact that he was going to commit $43 billion of borrowed money—borrowed taxpayers’ money; not money that he had in the bank or money that was left over from the coalition government, because by then it had already gone. He was quite happy to commit 43 thousand million dollars of borrowed money, upon which debt and interest would have to be paid for this ridiculous concept. When I thought about this, I thought to myself that maybe the minister in his arrogance, his ignorance and his inexperience did not commission a business plan because he did not know what they were all about. So, in responding to the bill this evening, I thought I would ruminate for a few moments on a business plan.

Business plans start with a vision. I went through all the documentation and I said to myself, ‘What most appropriately meets a vision statement for an NBN?’ and the best I could come up with was ‘a government owned and controlled enduring telecommunications monopoly’. I have not as yet been able to put that to the test, but it does seem from the documentation that I have read to be a fairly reasonable vision for an NBN and for the minister, had he bothered to commission a business plan. I then said to myself, ‘Well, if there was a vision, what might be the mission and the objectives of this particular exercise?’ As far as I can see from the studies I have done, the main objective of a business plan, if one had been done, would be to achieve the structural separation of Telstra. I will come back to that in some more detail later on.

Having addressed the objectives, one then turns around and says, ‘What are the targets for this new business?’ It seems to me that, in the main, the targets are Australian taxpayers and the shareholders, the customers and the employees of that company—that is, the publicly listed company, not the government owned monopoly called Telstra. I also would have hoped, as a person representing rural and regional constituents in my state of Western Australia, that this NBN Co. would be able to include in its targets improvements in services to the people in those areas. Regrettably, I do not see any evidence of that. Certainly Western Australian senators would say—and I am sure my colleague Senator Sterle would confirm this as he drives around Western Australia—