Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. As I said, they were considered by the Senate committee. I did not suggest that the third was, but what I have been arguing is that this is a mess you made. If Telstra wanted to close a phone box in this country, Telstra put a sticker on it and closed it down. We are now taking away the capacity for Telstra to unilaterally rip phone boxes out of the ground—literally rip them out of the ground, as they have been doing around this country—and get rid of them. We now have a different regime so that they are not able to do those things. We have an agency that will have funding from the government for the first time. You never put a cent in.

How was the universal service obligation fund previously done? Telstra would say it does not pay for all the costs of providing the universal service agency, and there is an existing levy on telcos. How was this figure devised? I think one of the former communications ministers from those opposite used to add his mother's age, divide by his shoe size and just make a number up. I know this because I have inherited it. Every year it comes across the table: 'What amount do we want to charge for the universal service obligation levy?' All we have done so far is roll it over, because trying to fathom the way that Senator Alston calculated the universal service obligation levy was actually comical. Nobody in the parliament, the bureaucracy or the industry has ever to this day been able to tell us what the formula was for creating the levy.

We stepped up and said it is time we had a new agency to make the calculations and to look at this levy arrangement. More importantly, for the first time—it did not come from the National Party or from the rural Liberal Party members that Senator Macdonald so proudly boasts of regularly—we have said the government will make a contribution to protecting the telecom­munications services in dollar terms. We are putting money in: $100 million each year into the future. We are putting that forward to the costs of the universal service levy to make sure Telstra cannot just rip phone boxes that people still use out of the ground. We are proud of that and we will not back away from that. This agency allows us to have a role in protecting telecommunications services for the first time. Those opposite, who privatised a vertically integrated monopoly and who were interested only in fattening up the cow for privatisation in the past, should hang their heads in shame and, as you are going to do in a few minutes, vote for this legislation, because it will be the absolute ultimate shame if you oppose an agency that will guarantee the protection of telecommunications services into the future for regional and rural Australians.