John Linton .....and monopolies can't ever act in any way other than as monopolies.
I finished reading the Australian week end papers earlier this morning and have also 'digested' the various on line media reports concerning the communications industry and the subjects that may be related to it not getting to bed until around 3 am courtesy of the time displacement between Sydney and Colombo and then slept like the dead for 7 hours. It's nice to be home, as always, and it's a beautiful Sydney Spring day.
My view on the NBN hasn't really changed and I still see it as a total irrelevance in any of the forms it might eventually be built if in fact that ever happens. After ten years or so of a travesty of 'competition' it can only be concluded that the 'privatisation' of Telecom Australia to create Telstra has been the single most grotesque 'policy' failures in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia and the most ludicrously inept attempt to bring about a competitive telecommunications environment in any country anywhere in the world.
The 'privatisation' of Telstra has been such a total failure, in every conceivable respect, there really are only two choices left for the current government:
1) Use their demonstrated ineptitude and complete lack of understanding of any slight aspect of the Australian communications marketplace and Telstra's current situation to continue by giving them more money via the 'NBN tender' to complete a formal re-monopolisation of the wireline services in Australia over the coming years.
2) Cancel the 'NBN tender' process and let Telstra build out its current network in any way it deems to be sensible and complete its re-monopolisation of Australia's wire line services in that 'non-interventionist' way and save the immediate wasted expenditure of tax revenue while accepting that Telstra will simply charge more for wireline and related services to cover it.
All that the 'privatisation' of Telstra has done is to pay tens of millions of dollars to failed American 'managers' instead of several million dollars to failed Australian managers to run a bloated and massively inefficient dinosaur with some of the most mediocre 'management' at every level ever seen in an alleged commercial company and to increase the number of inhouse lawyers and outside lawyer payments ten fold as the newly privatised Telstra used litigation and other legal challenges to fight tooth and nail to ensure the Australian Telecomunications Act never achieved any of its objectives. No further attempts at 'regulating' Telstra should be made by this, or any subsequent government.
Telstra is and will always be a monopoly (it can't be anything else by definition) managed only in its own interests and for its own interests. It can now use the rationale of 'share holder' interests to bolster its innate monopoly interests so FCS let it get on with its monopolistic practices minus the needs for immense added legal expenses and the slowing down of whatever minor technology it might invest in by bogus 'tenders' that only result in further slow downs.
Monopolies, by definition, are massively inefficient and attract only low level calibre personnel and their only inherent 'culture' is that of maintaining the status quo to protect themselves against the consequences of their mediocrity. Their only basis of "service" pricing is to simply add margins to their inefficient costs to continue to ensure they can continue to pay their own salaries and guarantee themselves jobs for life without ever having to exert themselves or do anything that impinges on the working time they need to indulge their hobbies and the operation of their personal 'outside' businesses during their monopoly paid working hours.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - it keeps these poorly skilled and abled people off formal welfare and creates an informal 'sheltered industry' environment for the people who work for monopolies - they are unemployable in normal commerce where they would have to perform against deadlines and deliver value for money. If there were no monopolies to employ such people then the Department Of Social Services would need an increase in budget equivalent to the number of people employed by monopolies. So it can be seen that Australians, in operating Telstra, are just paying taxes in a slightly different way and are, arguably, removing potential threats to society from the streets by giving them the illusions of a boost in self image by holding a 'paid job'.
Sure the cost of the services provided by monopolies are going to be higher and the quality worse than those provided by free enterprise but let's face it - it really doesn't matter a damn in this country. Australia already pays for the most wasteful and inept and astronomically expensive method of 'government' in the 'free world' (Federal/State/Local) with the most venal, if not outright criminal people involved at every level of it and we, as Australians, are quite happy with this massive cost to each one of us as we have voted to keep it since it was imposed on us by a departing colonial administrator in the nineteenth century.
We spend gigantic sums of money on our military (at highly inflated prices - much higher than the same equipment is sold to other buyers) which is usually obsolete before we receive it or we insist on paying huge royalties to the overseas designers so we can build it ourselves taking three times longer than it would otherwise take and then not function properly - or sometimes at all.
And so it goes on and on - every aspect of government in Australia is hugely wasteful, inept, venal and atrociously inefficient.... and we, the Australian voters have only ourselves to blame if we don't like any aspect of it.
There is enough competition in communications via the granting of mobile spectrum licenses which actually did break Telstra's monopoly and actually did reduce mobile prices and increase services to end users - eventually. There's every chance that LTE and other mobile initiatives will, sooner rather than later, remove the need for anyone who wishes to only use mobile voice and data services to stop paying the sky high prices that Telstra has always imposed on Australian users.
So let Telstra continue its monopoly and by doing that hopefully they will be able to fire their thousands of lawyers they currently need to keep communications competition as a dim aspiration of government doctrine and, who knows, maybe reduce their other hugely wasteful marketing and pricing practices designed to cripple any semblance of nascent competition to their monopolies and, in this way, actually reduce, ever so slightly certainly, their prices that are so much higher than every other country I have ever visited.
Telstra will become non-existent much sooner by allowing it to raise prices to a point where people will simply not use their services. Giving it another 10 billion of tax payer money to prolong its existence is not a good idea.