John Linton .....is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move." (Robert H Bork)
I was reminded of how much I owe to my 'high school' teachers who in the mid 20th century took the trouble to educate me in ways that can only be dreamed of in this day and age. It was written on the black board when I arrived in the head of the History Department's classroom for my first history lesson in my first term at my secondary school. I have never forgotten either it or the following five years of some of the most enjoyable and beneficial learning experiences of my life. (though I had to check the exact quotation before using it here).
Of course, there are many quotations and aphorisms that make the same or very similar points - it's just that I remembered, pretty much exactly, this one and the subsequent learning experiences in not only 'learning' history but understanding why examining the past and dismissing any single view, no matter how respected, qualified and learned, as anything but ONE view and unlikely to be comprehensive, let alone correct, fully informed or unbiased. It was also in those halcyon days that I learned that the last 'Statesman' died sometime in the mid 19th century and that I was also taught the more civilised version of:
Q: How do you know when a politician is lying? A: His lips move.
As a sensible person responsible for some parts of running a small business in a challenging operational environment I take quite some trouble to 'listen' to as many views as possible on all sorts of subects directly and indirectly related to Exetel's business and even more subjects that aren't related to Exetel's current business but by some stretch of the imagination may become related at some point in the future. It becomes obvious when you take a little bit of trouble to do this that almost everything you read or hear written or said by "Australian Communications Experts" or by "Senior Company Management" is either completely wrong based on ignorance or by design. The sad thing is that the incorrect statements are continuingly made based on the writer/speaker's knowledge that he/she is not actually expected to tell the truth or even get his/her facts correct because most of his/her audience expect them to lie and distort the truth.
It is quite sad for someone who considered themselves to have a reasonable mind and a passable intellect to come to this view bearing in mind my "careers master" making the dismissive comment in my one and only career planning session that "commerce is only for people with third class minds who also lack any semblance of ethics" - or words to that effect - it was a long time ago. Unfortunately I have only ever worked in 'commerce' for the whole of my woking life.
My reason for mentioning these two points in conjunction is that thee are a lot of current "givens" in telecommunications in Australia at the moment that are going to have to change over the next two or three years and will then be seen as never really being 'given' at all. What will become most important to understand over the coming 9 - 18 months is how the totally communications knowledge bereft Krudd and the totally truth averse Telstra screw each other into the ground over the doomed to total failure 'NBN2' and what opportunities this ludicrous clash of stupidity, arrogance, unscrupulousness and corruption brings about.
When we started the Exetel business we had the desire to create a very different type of company - we wanted to offer a 'suite' of services that would be at the lowest cost available in Australia and were delivered at levels of speed and reliability that were as good as or better than those provided by any other company. These were pretty silly objectives for a start up company but we believed them to be achievable over some period of time that we thought would be something less than three years. We didn't achieve those objectives within three years but after five years we are getting very close. The main thing standing in the way of achieving them completely is Telstra (yes I realise how naive that sounds but despite being told a long time ago to "always be prepared for unpredictable change") I'm not sure anyone could have been prepared for a Sol Trujillo raping and looting trip to Australia.
Things have become clearer now, if only a little, and having being forced to prepare Exetel for a Telstraless future it's going to now be easier rather than harder to achieve the objectives we set out to make happen than it would have been under the 'old' Telstra monopoly. One way or another there will be a change in the Telstra monopoly and while that may eventuate as not much of a change we believe it will be enough.
One thing is that the 'given' of a monopoly telecommunications provider in Australia, for the first time, is not a certainty and the fairy story of Snow Telstra and the four dwarves may have a slightly different ending. One thing's for sure - I don't think McGaughie expected El Sol to actually turn out to be the wicked witch with such a virulently poisoned apple that it will take more than a gentle kiss from a handsome government to revive Snow Telstra.