This is, firstly, to heartily thank you, on behalf of Citizens Against Selling Telstra, for having stated your intention to not allow the legislation for the full privatisation of Telstra to be rushed through without proper scrutiny by our Parliament and members of the public.

No doubt you will appreciate that our feeling of relief is also shared by 70% of Australians who are opposed to the sale as well as by the Queenslanders who voted for you last year on the basis of your stated opposition to the sale of Telstra.

In the rest of this letter I would like to address the arguments you gave earlier for having agreed to the sale of Telstra. We believe that these reasons are deeply flawed and hope to be able to convince you of this.

Firstly, we believe that each parliamentary representative can only accept responsibility for his or her own actions. You have argued that the consequences of your voting against the sale may result in greater harm to the public interest. Such harm could only be caused by people other than yourself, namely :

1. Another Senator, if he or she is persuaded to vote for the sale.
2. Senator Helen Coonan who said that the money necessary for fixing up rural telecommunications services would not be forthcoming if you failed to vote for the sale.

The first argument fails to give due recognition to the principled stance that all of the opposition, independent and minor party Senators maintained on behalf of the Australian public, when they blocked the full sale for all of these years.

We consider this to be a high point in the practice of Australian democracy. All too often in the past elected representatives have, instead, been induced to turn their backs on those who voted them into office.

Every opposition, independent or minor party senator in the current Senate has pledged to oppose the full privatisation of Telstra. Together with them you can block the sale if you choose to do so.

If you eventually decide to vote for the sale of Telstra, we don't consider it acceptable for you to excuse this by accusing others, almost certainly unfairly, of planning to do the same.

In regard to the second argument, Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan's threat to withdraw the offer of money was first reported in the Age on 14 August. She said "If there's no sale, no money.

"Those who oppose it, it will be on their heads if they have constituents complaining."

I think it would be far more likely that Australians would overwhelmingly hold Helen Coonan, herself, responsible.

After all, who was it that allowed the state of our telecommunications to slip to the deplorable state that it has become today? Who was it that milked Telstra of money to pay dividends in order to pay private investors and prop up the Government Budget?

In 1996 the Government held that the answer to Telstra's problems was partial privatisation. It should also be remembered that at that point, the Government insisted that it had every intention of always maintaining full majority Government ownership of Telstra.

We were told that once the Telstra managers were made accountable to shareholders that they would lift their game and deliver vastly better services to the public. In fact the complete reverse has occurred. As reported in The Australian last Thursday 7 September, up to $3billion of crucial infrastructure investment has been withheld whilst investors and the Government have milked Telstra of funds.

Nine years after the Howard Government first won office, it is clear that partial privatisation has made an unsatisfactory situation far worse and not better. Some of the costs that the public have had to bear for the folly of deregulation and partial privatisation include:

1. Monthly line rentals increased to $29.95 in 2004 from $11.65 in 2000 and they are threatened to go up further. In fact the cost is so high that many customers are not even maintaining landline connections.
2. At least 21,000 jobs from Telstra's 1991 workforce of 76,522 axed, with a further 19,000 of those remaining made contractors or casual, hundreds more IT jobs outsourced only this year. The loss of employment opportunities has contributed to the decline of many rural areas.
3. The closure of Telstra's world class training centres. This is one cause of the skills shortage that has caused so many problems in recent years.
4. Australia has dropped from being a world pace setter in the field of telecommunications to where it is today, that is, in the lowest quartile amongst developed countries for the take up of broadband Internet connections. Billions of dollars which could have been used to begin the comprehensive rollout of a fibre optic cable network were, instead, squandered on the failed dotcom venture in Hong Kong.

It is Senator Coonan and her predecessors who have had it within their power, should they have chosen to do so, to have properly fixed up our telecommunications network and long ago given all of us the twenty first century telecommunications service that we all deserve and for which we have all paid many times over through our taxes and our many considerable phone bills over the years.

Instead, she has allowed our infrastructure to reach this deplorable state for what can only be, at best, described as reasons of blind ideology.

Now, to add insult to injury, she threatened you and your constituency to allow this appalling state to continue unless you agree to privatisation.

I fail to see why you couldn't simply have called senator Coonan's bluff. How could any minister with any regard for the interests of the public, whom she is supposedly serving, have resorted to making such a threat?

If full privatisation proceeds this bad situation can only be made even worse for taxpayers, Telstra's workforce and its customers.

1. Finance Minister Nick Minchin recently confirmed that there will be less money to spend on infrastructure, health and education once privatisation has been completed. Of course this should be little surprise to anyone given that we will lose more revenue from Telstra that we could hope to gain from interest, and that Australian taxpayers are to be billed $500 million just for the sale itself.
2. Solomon Trujillo recently announced plans to axe 80% of services and to eliminate even more jobs. This seems to go well beyond a sensible rationalisation of Telstra's product lines and it is hard to imagine how customers would not suffer as a result.
3. Recently, John Howard failed to give to a talkback radio caller any assurance that her husband would not lose his job in a call centre if privatisation occurred

If, indeed, there is any worth in the deal you have reached, which, it appears will amount to only $100 million per year for the whole of the country, the price to be paid by the whole of the Australian community for this deal is completely unacceptable.

Why on earth is it necessary to put ourselves through all of this when the most simple and blindingly obvious solution to the problem has been completely overlooked by your Government?

That solution, of course, is to simply maintain the current majority Government ownership of Telstra and use that majority control to direct Telstra to begin to properly serve the Australian public, particularly rural Australia.

Whatever money could be raised from the sale could far more easily be spent directly by Telstra itself in order to fix the problems.

The Australian public, through its Government, could be in control of our telecommunications services once again. Given that even a majority of Telstra shareholders appear to oppose privatisation, there should be little political difficulty in achieving this.

In time the whole focus of telecommunications policy can be changed back to what it always should have been, that is to provide all Australians with the best, most cost-effective, telecommunications services which are within our means. We should not have to satisfy the dictates of large institutional investors, before decisions as to whether or not to perform crucial maintenance work, or else, to invest in new technology, are made.

This is not to say that the private sector should not have a role to play in our telecommunications sector, however the role they play must be strictly subordinated to the public interest. As just one example, we can never again allow a private company to dictate to us that we must close down an expensive piece of infrastructure such as occurred with our national anaolgue mobile phone network in order to obtain the agreement of Optus and Vodafone to set up digital mobile phone networks.

The choice is now in your hands.

If you vote against full privatisation, then we have some hope of properly fixing up the problems that have plagued our telecommunications sector since at least 1989, when Telstra was made, inappropriately in our view, to run as a business rather than as a public service.

Hopefully, the defeat of the privatisation legislation will make your Government finally acknowledge that its telecommunications policies since 1996 have been seriously misguided and that it will begin the process of properly rectifying the problem.

If you choose to take this course, as we hope you will, you can be assured of our support as well as the support of 70% of the Australian public who are opposed to the sale, and the many unions, community groups and other organisations out there who are actively opposed to the sale.

On the other hand, if you eventually choose, instead, to vote for privatisation, please understand that this not likely to be the end of the matter.

On Thursday Lindsay Tanner committed the Labor Party to repealing the privatisation legislation should it win Government in 2007 and Telstra remain unsold.

Given the current unsatisfactory state of Telstra's services the network and the current Telstra share price, this means that the Coalition will have to break at least two more election promises if Telstra is to be sold before the 2007 elections. Those promises were :

1. not to proceed with the sale until services for all Australians were satisfactory; and
2. not to proceed with the sale until a 'decent' return to the taxpayer was achieved. the price to be achieved was widely understood to be $5.25 as opposed to around $4.30 now.

Just how many more broken election promises from this Government should the public be made to accept?

For our part you can be assured that CAST will do its utmost to hold to account each and very Federal Parliamentary representative, who votes in favour of privatisation, for the inevitable harm that such a decision will cause to ordinary Australians.

We trust that after you consider the overwhelming evidence contained in this letter and elsewhere that you will arrive at the decision that an emphatic majority of Queenslanders rural Australians and urban Australians ask of you, and announce, unambiguously, your intention to vote against the sale.