Senator Steve Fielding - Leader of Family First

Senator Steve Fielding,

I was previously unaware of you and your party Family First. Being a long term ALP supporter, traditionally voting for the ALP, I had little knowledge of the minor parties.

However, your recent expression of empathy for the shabby treatment of Telstra “mum and dad” shareholders by the incumbent Government touched a raw nerve when I saw you speaking on TV today, and I feel ever so grateful that Australia is thankfully a democratic nation, that we have freedom of speech, that we have perceptive principled people of integrity such as yourself in our Parliament, to provide the necessary checks and balances on the incumbent Government.

Having retired after a lifetime dedicated to education, I rely for support on my self funded Superannuation Fund, which is invested substantially in Telstra shares, because they were an Australian icon and were largely owned by the Future Fund, a Government sponsored entity, and because they were being sold by the Government itself. I assumed that the Government would look after its own so to speak. I have always believed in the ideals of the ALP and in fact voted for the ALP in the last election.

However, I am seriously disillusioned by the behaviour of this incumbent Government in its pursuit of its ill conceived NBN and the heavy handed arrogant approach it has taken with Telstra in its bid to pursue and fund this white elephant project, which had its nascence in a politically motivated unplanned and unbudgeted election promise. The folly of the NBN project and the associated decisions of this Government is only surpassed by the recent “Home Insulation” debacle.

The proposed legislation which effectively threatens to destroy Telstra by breaking it up and denying it access to future wireless spectrum unless it co-operates and helps to fund this white elephant project is worse than un-Australian. If it were industry behaving in this manner, it would no doubt be dubbed outrageously un-Australian, immoral and anti competitive. If our business community behaved in such an unprincipled and underhanded manner, it would more than likely be prosecuted.
   
It is suggested that the nub of the problem is that the NBN project was given birth with a political objective in mind and had not been thought through carefully from the outset with a realistic business plan. In order to cover for this, it would seem that the Government is making its hastily and ill conceived plan worse in its bid to develop the NBN by itself, partly funding it by “nationalising” Telstra and partly funded by the taxpayer. This is particularly galling in that it was the Australian Government that sold the Telstra shares to the public in the first place. Shareholders bought the Telstra shares in good faith!  There is a palpable element of bad faith in this strategic play in support of a white elephant project costing a whopping $43 Billion, which by the time it is implemented, could well have been superseded by wireless technology delivering comparable speeds and bandwidth. The key player in the development of such wireless technology would logically be Telstra as it alone has the wherewithal, were it not for the fact that this Government might well by then have effectively crippled Telstra by denying it the capacity to develop such wireless technology, barring it from access to the crucial radio spectrum required.

The legislation appears to incorporate a thinly veiled attempt to stifle the more flexible and advanced wireless technology bearing in mind that such technology could render the NBN obsolete. So perhaps this Government is holding Australia back rather than moving it forward and is doing so at the expense of the taxpayer not to mention Telstra shareholders, in a desperate bid to justify its own political ends.

Is the pursuit of this NBN white elephant project truly in the best interests of Australia?

Senator Fielding, it is refreshing to hear you speak in support of the “mum and dad” Telstra shareholders who have unwittingly been caught up in this political mess, which has the potential to turn into a debacle worse than the “Home Insulation” conundrum.

What is needed to sort out this mess, is a total rethink of the NBN proposal, taking sound business decisions that are truthfully in the best interests of Australia founded on practical commercial reality along normal business lines and principles. It should not be necessary to unfairly penalise “mum and dad” Telstra shareholders, in order to fund development of the new technologies.  The best and fairest solution would result, I believe, if the role of Government were simply to encourage and co-ordinate the resources of industry, arranged along usual commercial lines of business. The public would then perhaps fund the development through an IPO, but they certainly would not invest in this white elephant project, with our Government demonstrating a propensity to interfere with and destroy the value in a commercial entity such as Telstra, in order to cover up and help fund its political blunders.

Senator Fielding, please use your standing in the Senate to bring about change to our Parliament, to bring honesty, truth, integrity, transparency, fairness, justice, and above all sound business judgement to the Australian Government.

You and your party will certainly have my vote in the up coming federal elections and I would think that the million plus Telstra shareholders who stand to be unjustly disenfranchised by the incumbent Government, are of similar sentiment.

Please put a stop to this politically motivated folly and madness.

The NBN has failed the first basic criteria for a business venture - a transparent and convincing business case and authentic financial plan.  It should not be supported without these.

The massacre of Telstra after firstly being sold by Govt so as to facilitate the Govt creating a new version of Telstra is unconsionable and I would have thought unconstitutional!  It should be subjected to a high level of scrutiny by the Senate and, if still in any doubt, blocked.

Absolutely right. Mismanagement, lack of transparency, lack of a convincing business plan all practical requirements without which we have the hallmarks of yet another “Home insulation” type debacle . To attempt to fund this misguided project by tactics more akin to blackmail than to good governance is unworthy of Australian government.

Senator Fielding, behaviour that is unconscionable and unconstitutional has no place in Australian politics.

This legislation requires careful scrutiny indeed and surely should be blocked if there is any doubt whatsoever! Australians deserve the highest standard of integrity and sound decision making from their elected politicians. There is no place in Australian government for arrogance, recklessness, and abuse masked by spin.

The Australian electorate will no doubt provide feedback at the next polls but in the meantime the next debacle should be prevented before it gets any further down the track.

As an Aussie and a former Teltra customer, I cannot agree with Your points.

Their service is lousy in that You are now made to talk with machines then to outsourced overseas service centres.

For this reason customers are treated with arrogant contempt by management.

This is why I have taken my business elsewhere, their promises (Marketing message )are not enough.
Until Word of Mouth towards Telstra improves then only then will I consider going back to them.

This has been going on for years now and still SNAFU is the result.

My advice is sell your shares because their is only one direct that they are going.

Whether Telstra has treated its customers well or otherwise, it is still not sensible to waste $43B of taxpayer’s hard earned money, in a reckless bid to build the NBN independent of the existing resources available that were previously owned by the government, but sold to the public via an IPO. The current proposal is reckless and wasteful and makes no business sense whatsoever. It is no doubt being driven by political motives rather than good business and economic sense. The Government of the day needs always to work hand in glove together with industry in a win win situation. This current government seems to be hell bent on decision making driven by political ends rather than working in harmony with industry, in order to promote and strengthen the Australian economy. The result is ultimately a lose lose outcome as you “kill the goose that lays golden eggs” so to speak. The reckless wastefulness caused by the incompetence of the incumbent government is evidenced by the Pink Bats debacle, the BER wastefulness, the NBN White Elephant, the unworkable ETS and most recently, the greed driven destructive RSPT. Of course the reason behind proposing the RSPT is to fund the wasteful, ineffective political driven programs referred to above! Then there is the ultimate insult of wasting yet another $38M of hard earned taxpayer’s money to try to convince the electorate that the government are sound economic managers, when the facts speak for themselves! The time has come to take the reins away from this incompetent government and the most recent polls is the evidence of this. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all the people all of the time. The Australian electorate is obviously beginning to wake up to what is really going on. The writing is on the wall. This government may well experience the rare ignominy of being only the second government since federation to serve only one term of office.

I agree with You that Government built Utilities should never have been sold off.

However, when they are and then go on to become a monopoly that is not healthy either. Too much power in corporate hands is a very bad thing.

But this cannot be reversed at this stage, I think.

The result being to create another utility being the NBN.

Having said this We must at some point hold to account those that we vote in to manage these entities.

To date Teltra over the past years has not been upgrading or improving its infrastructure enough and has been overtaken by its many competitors, too much has milked away to shareholders and management salaries and stock options.

Telstra is like howard, its going down.