MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Ms LE (Fowler) (15:59): We've heard members mention in this House, for instance, NBN. As of June 2025, NBN's co-audit accounts show net liabilities of $4,309 million. They basically owe more than they own.
The parliament has spent about $50 billion of taxpayers' money to buy it back and to rebuild it. Telstra went from a public telecommunications provider to a fully privatised company. The Commonwealth Bank was sold in three tranches and fully privatised by 1996.
Across the states, electricity networks, gas pipelines and major ports were sold or leased. In New South Wales, families pay tolls on motorways that used to be part of the public road network. Every one of those sales came with the same promise: more competition, more efficiency and cheaper and better services for the public.
But when I talk to my constituents in Fowler they don't talk about cheaper energy or transport. They talk about power bills that keep going up. They talk about paying tolls just to get to work or take the kids to school.
They talk about struggling with large telecommunications and banking corporations when something goes wrong, feeling like a number in a queue rather than a customer with rights. A constituent in Liverpool wrote to me recently. He lives alone in his own home, managing ongoing health challenges.
He has almost no mobile phone reception in that home. He cannot reliably call his family, he cannot reliably ring his doctor and, if something goes wrong in the middle of the night, he cannot reliably call for an ambulance. This is not a remote area; this is Liverpool in the heart of south-west Sydney, in one of the fastest growing parts of this country and one of the most disadvantaged.
The second story comes from Carramar, another suburb in my electorate of Fowler. I was doorknocking there recently, and residents told me that when flooding comes, they get cut off. The network is poor at the best of times.
In a flash flood, when the water is rising and they need to call for help in an emergency, they cannot get through. These are not complaints about convenience. This is about whether someone can get help when their life depends on it.
We sold the national telecommunications carrier. We did not sell the responsibility that came with it. That responsibility still sits in this place.
The safety net we built was designed around a land line on the wall. It was not designed for a country where the phone in your pocket is how you can call for help. I'm not standing here to say we're going to buy it all back.
I'm realistic—those assets are gone, and those contracts run for decades. But I'm sure that there are lessons in this for us. You can sell the asset; you cannot sell the responsibility.
When the bill is too high, when the call does not connect, people do not ring a boardroom; they come to my office. I'm sure they come to many other members' offices as well. They sit in front of you, and they ask for help.
They ask what are we going to do about it. That is where it lands. It lands with us, so let us protect what is left.
That means a genuine public interest test, before any remaining public asset is sold or leased, measured against the people who will depend on it not just against the sale price. It means service obligations that reflect how people live today not how they lived 30 years ago. And it means real oversight and real consequences when providers let communities down, whether they are public or private, because when the lights go out and when the bills become unaffordable, people do not call the shareholders.
When the water rises in Carramar, no-one rings a shareholder, they dial triple zero and hope it connects—and most of the time it doesn't. The government is still expected to deliver. If we are serious about the cost of living and serious about making sure no community is left behind, then we must be serious about who controls what we have left.
We cannot afford to learn these lessons twice.