Woolerton R Doug: Telecommunications Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Woolerton R Doug: Telecommunications Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:636;Page:7153] 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
: 
 New Zealand First will be supporting the Telecommunications Amendment Bill and enthusiastically so. But I think it is important to point out the failures that have led to the need for this legislation. 
Rodney Hide 
: Show some enthusiasm Doug. 
R DOUG WOOLERTON 
: I reassure Rodney Hide that I am highly excited at this point. This is about as excited as I get. So leading up to Christmas members had better take a good look because it will have to last a couple of months. If I get any more excited than this I will not be responsible for the consequences. 
However in speaking to this bill I say that this legislation is necessary because of a failure and that is sad. New Zealand First has said on many many occasions and made issue of the fact that we should not be selling our major infrastructure in New Zealand—and we have sold it. In this bill yet again we are having to address an issue where the market has not delivered what it should have. To me that is sad. I think it is unfortunate that Telecom has not reacted to its customers in a proper manner. It has not kept up with technology it has not delivered what its customers were expecting it has not delivered what the Government of this country was expecting and this legislation has become necessary because of that. 
In fact when it was first announced that the Government was to become involved in this issue a man called Rod Deane who was the chairman of Telecom at the time announced that he would resign forthwith because he would not have anybody messing around with his company. Oh dear! I am so sad and sorry about that because that man more than any other is responsible for this legislation. He focused on one thing and one thing only—that is a return to his shareholders and dare I say it to himself. This company is not known for low salaries. This company is not known for diligence as far as the customer is concerned. I hope and I believe that with a new chairman at the top of this company we will have a company that is responsive to the market to what we in New Zealand expect out of a telecommunications company and to best world practice. 
At the end of the day there are no surprises in what has been done to Telecom. I suspect—and the sharemarket shows that this is true—that in fact the market was expecting far more to be done to Telecom than has been done because the market has gone up since these changes have been announced. These changes were based broadly on the British Telecom model. They were based broadly on changes that had happened in England. The Minister and his team have brought them to the House and put them before us for consideration so we have not been dealing with an unknown quantity here. 
The previous operators of Telecom could have put these changes in place in their own time frame and at their own speed and they could have had them up and running today. In fact one of the requests from Telecom to us was that we did not insist on expecting too much of what it calls its legacy platform or legacy services because the company will have to renew just about all of its technology throughout the country to deliver on the issues required by this legislation. If the previous chairman had been insistent on a free-market model that was actually delivering to the public that renewal would have been done progressively out of profits and retained earnings as the years went by. So I say that this company previously has not been run as it should have been—never mind the customers; it has not been run in a responsible manner in order to take care of reinvestment in the sort of technology this legislation requires. 
Without question Telecom should be New Zealand’s leading technology company. It is the wish of the Finance and Expenditure Committee and I know that it is the wish of the officials and the Minister that it will be so. But sadly it has taken this Parliament to drag this company yelling and screaming into the 21st century and that is sad. It was not until we had a closed-door session with the chairman of the company—to whom I give credit; I have named him several times now and I do so again—and said that he had better engage in this process or otherwise the Government would do it for him. And we had a resolution very quickly after that. 
I commend the chairman for that because he saw what his predecessor and the executives of that company had not seen previously—that the Government had the resolve to make changes because it would not put up with a second-rate telecommunications industry in New Zealand. As has been mentioned by other speakers with our isolation from markets and our absolute need to communicate with them on a daily weekly and monthly basis telecommunications are essential. We have to be not just as good as the rest of the world but above and beyond the standard of the rest of the world. This company should be—and I hope will be—a company with best world practice; a model of excellence. As I believe in a collaborative spirit that is the hope I personally have and that is the hope the select committee has. I know the Minister has that view and this was the mood in which this legislation was debated in the select committee. 
I must say that in view of what the public has seen in the newspapers in regard to this Parliament and some contentious issues that have flowed from it I wish that the public could have seen the collaborative efforts that went on in the select committee over this legislation—and I know that the same is true for other select committees. It has been a collaborative issue from the people in the select committee right through to the Minister and officials and it has been a lesson indeed. I think the outcome will be excellent.