Senator,
I commend your stand on Telstra's lock of commitment to Australians. All the proponents of the Telstra sale were adamant that services would not be affected... Now we see they were wrong.

PS It is good to see that there are some politicians willing to use technology to foster participation in Democracy rather than diminish it.

Senator,

A rhetorical question...do we live in a free market economy?
I find it unbelievable that there is no debate as to the bigger issue, which is the fact that Telstra is 49% owned by free choice investors.
Who sold the shares on the basis that their profitability would be stymied by endless debate?
I wish one politician would have the guts to actually support Telstra in its battle for growth, instead of pandering to the neverending minorities. Australia is a rich country, the people will use the phone less if they cant afford it.
Let Sol do his job, and invest his profits back into his company. All politicians should stop treating Telstra like it belongs to the Government. The Government belongs to the people, and the people invested in Telstra. To get return on investment.
There is plenty of potential competition, and there are bucketloads of investment dollars available to anyone who wants to establish infrastructure and compete. But why should they invest their own money when they get to piggyback a shackled giant?
How about the government buying the shares back at the price paid in T1. How can it be that in the last 10 years every other major Australian company has trebled, and Telstra has halved?
I am 36, grew up in Canberra, and left Australia 5 years ago when I realised that it was run by the same economists that run America.
The bigger issue here is where is the opposition.

The political debate in telecommunications has been completely dominated by the issue of the sale (or part therefor depending onthe numbers in the Senate!) of Telstra. For the Howard Government, the politics of the sale have turned into the politics of maximising the profits/share price of Telstra. This has been at the expense of the real issue, which ought to have been how best to set competition policy and service standards to ensure rapid broadband penetration. The opposition's approach, to oppose further privatisation and instead focus on service affordability and quality through competition and structural changes to the sector was and still is the right approach as it a) removes the conflict of interest the Government has in preserving Telstra's dominance by virtue of their policy to sell it and b) it recognises that without some sort of structural separation of Telstra, competition policy can't be fully effective anyway!

Realistically however, Lebanon and the UN has done nothing to quell Hizbellah terrorists in southern lebanon for years. What Israel has done has been terrible, but at least they're doing something to help the people of southern lebanon and israel's own civilians.