John Linton
Over the past week or so Exetel has been making some relatively minor changes to its web site to include information on the 'green' processes the company has decided to put in place starting in 2008. Basically there are two things Exetel advised its customers it was intending to do:
1) Pay a little more for 'green' electricity and make monthly donations to plant trees to 'neutralise' Exetel's carbon emissions.
2) Set aside approximately one third of Exetel's monthly profits to help save Australian fauna from extinction.
This has included advising our customers via email of what these proposed changes may mean to them as individual customers as well as opening discussion topics on the Exetel Forums. It was really nice to see that, of those people who chose to respond, the vast majority considered the proposed donations by Exetel to be a positive thing and that many of those who responded would take the opportunity of making additional donations to the projects that Exetel was proposing to support themselves.
(warm glow begins to spread)
Then there were the other responses, admittedly not anything like as numerous as the supportive ones, that made me wonder what sort of society I was now living in. Apart from the idiotic (who cares if a bird no longer exists?) and (if you're so !@#$%^& rich why not cut your prices?) there were a bewildering array of other negative communications on the forums and via PMs to the forum administrators and emails to Exetel managers impugning Exetels motives and motivations and suggesting everything proposed was some sort of tax scam or 'marketing' scheme.
In, relatively gently, attempting to rebut some of the more sensible, but nevertheless devastatingly negatively phrased communications it became apparent that no matter what was said, how logically it was explained and how cogent the examples given were, nothing could dissuade these correspondents from their view that Exetel was scamming them. The fact that Exetel was using its own paper thin profits to pay for more expensive electricity, tree planting schemes and charitable donations couldn't convince any of those critics that it wasn't somehow financially beneficial to Exetel and/or Exetel's owners.
There were constant claims of "tax advantages". It seemed those people making such assertions failed to understand that:
1) You have to make a profit and donate it before you get a portion of your donation back.
2) At the current company tax rate of 33% the other 66% is not somehow "coming back to you".
It wasn't until I was sent this URL that I began to understand how all this "tax scam" criticism was coming about:
http://www.primus.com.au/PrimusWeb/HomeSolutions/Green+Broadband/
together with the "mathematics" from the correspondent which, minus the invective embedded in to every phrase, could be summed up as:
a) the company charges the customer 98 cents a month for 'green broadband'
b) the company plants 5 trees a year per customer
c) the company makes this possible by making donations to a tax registered organisation (LandCare Australia)
d) checking the LandCare site the cost per tree is $3.00 (probably less) giving a total cost to the company of $15.00
e) the customer contributes $11.76
f) 0f the $15.00 donated by the company the ATO refunds 30% = $4.50
g) the company therefore gets an extra $1.26 (nett) from each customer and "promotes" itself as ecologically responsible.
I don't know whether the numbers quoted are accurate or not but I can, at a stretch, see why some people might be very suspicious about of what Exetel proposes doing if their knowledge of tax law and basic arithmetic is on par with this particular correspondent.
And there I was thinking this was the season of the year in this country when people were in a happier frame of mind.