Establishment: Richard Alston

Alston: I was appointed shadow minister for communications in 1989, and at that stage it was very much a ministerial backwater

Richard Alston, former communications minister and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, is busy watching from the sidelines the telecommunications industry he did so much to shape. Alston was the Howard government minister responsible for privatising Telstra, of which the reverberations are still highly evident.

“Having just completed my MBA thesis on telecommunications, I was appointed shadow minister for communications in 1989, and at that stage it was very much a ministerial backwater,” Alston says. “I don’t think anyone really saw the role it would play as the internet emerged and telecommunications became a core policy issue.”

After a decade in opposition, Alston was appointed Minister for Communications and the Arts when John Howard was elected in April 1996. Alston immediately set about planning for the gradual privatisation of what was then the government-owned telecommunications company, Telstra.

“As [former] prime minister Paul Keating had favoured the idea of breaking Telstra up and selling off key parts, like mobiles and Yellow Pages and so on, so we went to the 1996 election promising to sell it as a single company to ensure it would be a going concern,” Alston says. “We were confident that there would be vigorous competition because in the years before the 2000 tech wreck, there was a very real prospect of major international telcos entering the market.”

In 2004, after 18 years in the Senate and eight in government, Alston retired from federal parliament to become Australia’s man in London and watch from afar as his ministerial successor, Helen Coonan, struggled through the more combative era of Sol Trujillo’s leadership of Telstra.

Alston supports the recent agreement between Telstra and the National Broadband Network Company as it will give Telstra a war chest to expand into new markets and boost its wireless internet offering. But he remains sceptical that the NBN will ever become a commercially viable venture.

Alston has now moved on from telecommunications to focus on finance and fine arts. In London, he met BRW Rich 200 member Michael Hintze, founder and chief executive of hedge fund CQS, and a well-known donor to conservative politics and other causes.

“I got to know Michael in London. He’s very supportive of the arts and other community activities, and very involved in the Conservative Party,” Alston says. “So we found we had a lot in common.”

At the end of his posting in February 2008, Alston began participating in a high-level consultative group that Hintze fosters, and more recently accepted the task of establishing an Australian presence for CQS.

Alston also continues his connection with the arts, chairing the Melba Foundation, a charitable trust dedicated to the production of high-quality classical music recordings, and the promotion of Australian classical musicians in local and international markets.

BRW

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