John Linton
...Providing You Don't Care Who Gets The Credit. (H S Truman - I cant remember the exact words).
A sensible view of how a sensible person should carry out their working and social life.
I was reminded how very few people take this view on three occasions over the last week and on each occasion it was a Telstra employee who made my skin crawl in distaste at their self serving utterances.
The first one was the newly appointed head of something or other at Telstra, David Quilty (recent ex Liberal party hack) who in saying that ONLY TELSTRA could build the NBN (No Bandwidth Now) claimed that Telstra had been "building telephone services in remote Australia for over 100 years". What a piece of total s*** this man must be and what fools he takes Australians for to make this grossly incorrect and totally spurious self serving claim.
Any relationship the current Telstra (a public company barely fifteen years old) has to the governments of the colonies of pre-Federation Australia is so miniscule there actually is no relationship. The British built the first telegraph services and constructed the first capital city telephone exchanges in the late 19th century in the separately governed Australian colonies of Victoria and Queensland and a little later NSW. This was of course when the word "remote parts of Australia" had a meaning in this time before interstate highways, helicopters, air travel and four wheel drives. Remote = 10 miles out of six capital cities.
Shortly after Federation the Australian Post Master General's department was formed and amalgamated the seperate infrastructures of the old colonies under one administration and pursued the policies of successive governments until 'privatisation'. That organisation did truly serve the Australian people wherever they lived (sure pork barrel decisions were part of politics then as now) but they ALWAYS built services for people irrespective of costs as part of the ALL AUSTRALIANS ARE EQUAL 'policies'.
From 1901 until the separation of the PMG into the Australian Post Office (mail deliveries) and the Australian Telecommunications Commission (wire line and satellite services) in the mid 1970s the PMG was responsible for all 'messages' transmitted around Australia (in article, print or by wire).
Only in 1997 did "Telstra" appear and from that point onward the altruistic (or if you must - pork barrel) building of telephony services (claimed by the lying David Quilty) transformed from a Federal Government commitment to the whole of Australia to the vested interests of an unscrupulous 'commercial enterprise' which has since railed against (and fought tooth and nail to degrade and back away from) the "uneconomic policies" of providing those services Quilty now claims the credit for.
What a complete wanker. He takes credit for his new employer for actions and aspirations of altruistic Colonial and then Federal Government owned public utility and expects no-one to notice his reversal of the old American President's shrewd observation.
The second piece of Telstra vomit inducing self congratulation occurred in Exetel's offices. Because of my personal loathing of pointless 'meetings' I can't bring myself to waste some of the little time I have left on this planet to 'meet' with Telstra's drones more than once every two or three years but, for a variety of reasons, I had been asked by the Exetel person responsible to attend this meeting.
I put up with listening to the arrogant, self righteous and just downright stupid and lying statements from three Telstra personnel (two in attendance and one via teleconference) for the best part of 40 minutes (my head buried in my hands for almost half of that time in pretended concentration on what was being drivelled out) before calling the meeting to a halt as it was achieving nothing other than making me feel increasingly physically ill. In that time The Telstra personnel who spoke repeatedly said:
1) Everything Exetel did was wrong and Exetel was the most incompetent wholesale customer Telstra had
2) Everything that Exetel, or Exetel's customers said was an outright lie
3) Everything that Telstra did was 100% correct in each and every circumstance without fail - no Telstra service ever failed.
4) Every statement by every Telstra employee and contractor was the exact truth especially when it varied from what Exetel or an Exetel customer said.
5) Telstra define "truth" as anything they say. Telstra define "untruth" as anything anyone else says that contradicts what any Telstra employee or contractor says.
6) Every one of the 50,000+ Telstra employees and contractors (contrary to logic and population characteristic distribution) has never made any verbal or written statement that is anything else other than 100% true.
7) Telstra is the only organisation in Australia, make that the world (apart from some older communist governments possibly) that is capable of determining what is true or not true in any circumstance or at any time and only Telstra's pronouncement on such issues is final and immutable and infallible.
I really regretted wasting so much of my time - and indeed wasting so much of the other people's time who had to travel to our offices to make those ridiculous statements.
The third occasion was reading today's press and realising that Australia is so stupid that the CEO of Telstra is paid 330 times the average Australian worker's annual wages to ensure Australia has the most expensive communications services in the Western World. In the article (on page 47 of the SMH - 6/9/08) it quoted the salaries of the head of Japan's NTT (twice the size of Telstra) Norio Wada as being $328,000 (around 5 times that of the average Australian worker) and that of France Telecom, Thierry Bretion, as being $1.52 million while El Sol's salary is around $A20,000,000 per annum.
We really are a dumb country - our luck ran out some time ago - when Telstra was 'privatised' - with remuneration policies like that no wonder Telstra charges the highest prices in the world for inadequate telecommunication services.