PM hails NBN passage as historic

Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has hailed as historic the passage of legislation to structurally separate Telstra.

Parliament's lower house approved Senate amendments to the legislation in a vote at 2.15pm (AEDT) on Monday.

The vote was passed on the voices without the coalition calling for a division.

"Today in the parliament the government has delivered an historic win for Australian families and businesses," she told reporters in Canberra, flanked by communications minister, Stephen Conroy, and leader of government business, Anthony Albanese.

It also was an historic micro-economic reform through the structural separation of Telstra, she said.

The $36 billion national broadband network (NBN), a key Labor election promise, can proceed with Telstra's participation.

"For almost 30 years now this nation has tried to reform Telstra ... so that the wholesale business and the retail business were not fused together creating an anti-competitive monopoly," Gillard said.

"We have achieved that structural separation."

Gillard said approval of the Telstra legislation was a "big win".

"But the government will not be resting on its laurels in delivering this win for Australian families and Australian business," Gillard said.

"I want to make it clear that 2011 will be a year of delivery."

Senator Conroy accused the opposition of being wreckers by their failure to back the legislation.

"When it came to the choice between supporting significant, what has been often described as the holy grail of micro-economic reform in the telecommunications sector, the opposition went missing," he said.

The NBN now had an enormous task ahead, Senator Conroy said.

"It has an enormous task to begin the rollout around Australia at its peak," he said.

"There'll be 31 different build spots around Australia, there will be an enormous engineering task."

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