The Telstra bills are through, but as Kim Beazley said yesterday, that
doesn’t mean the debate over the sale of the telco will disappear.

Getting the legislation through could turn out to be the easy part –
although that wasn’t handled with the greatest of delicacy. Michelle Grattan’s comments today are spot on:

In forcing the Telstra legislation through this week, the
Government has shown how it will treat the Senate when it wants to get
important bills passed quickly. Committee hearings will be minimal;
debate will be gagged.

Government leaders after the election made all sorts of high-flown
promises not to abuse the new Senate power. But on the first big test
that is just what they have done. They have shown disdain for
parliamentary niceties.

At the same time, Mike Seccombe’s observations of the Senate, “whipped and gagged” are right, too:

Joyce jumped the queue, much to the fury of the Democrats’
Natasha Stott Despoja, who almost missed out on speaking as a result.

She finally got to her feet at 11.25, five minutes before the
guillotine came down, and declared the Government’s tactics made this
“the most shameful day and the most shameful display I have ever seen.”

No doubt she had a point, in procedural terms, but the truth is
everyone knew pretty much what she and all the other speakers were
going to say.

What will be less predictable is the sale itself. The Australian’s economics correspondent David Uren
raises a worse-case scenario “For what is being billed as the
corporate sale of the century, the final privatisation of Telstra will
bring remarkably little benefit to the budget and may even leave
taxpayers out of pocket.”

And when? As Grattan observes, “the jury is out on whether the Telstra
decision and the accompanying package will be looked back on as good or
bad policy, canny or foolish politics” – but it will be a matter of
years before we can reach a verdict.

All of this ties into Beazley’s key line
from yesterday: “This is a debate that’s not going to go away. The
government has handled it not in nation-building terms, which is
Labor’s approach, but in the ideological terms.”

There should be plenty of opportunities to test his assertion that “it’s not
over once it’s through Parliament of course, because then there is the
issue of selling it, and quite frankly they will not be able to sell
Telstra between now and the next election at anything other than fire
sale prices.”

The Telstra fun is just beginning.