John Linton
I usually have the TV on one or other of the business channels on Sunday mornings as I attempt to clear my day from the issues that have developed overnight and when I respond to email and other duties. I don't really listen to what's being said in the endless talking head interviews but an interview with Muhammed Yunus caught my attention yesterday when he made the statement that "of course a purely commercial organization can have a purely social objective rather than the commonly found purely commercial objective of making money for its shareholders. He was referring to Grameen Bank the details of which I quickly looked up here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank
When a Nobel Peace Prize winner (both he and the bank he founded) and an impeccably financially credentialled one makes startling comments it's sure to be an interesting 'chat'. So I stopped what I was doing and listened to the rest of the interview. In essence he, and his Grameen Bank are simply a hugely successful embodiment of the old "give a man a fish and he will not go hungry for a day; teach him to catch fish and he will not go hungry for the rest of his life." (attributed to Lao Tzu). However he spoke so refreshingly and so cogently that you have to wonder why more people and more organisations don't do exactly the same things as both the way he articulated the very simple ideas and the illustrations and data he provided made compelling listening.
When he finished that old Roberta Flack song (allegedly about Don Maclean) came in to my mind:
And so I came to see him to listen for a while.
And there he was this young boy [old man], a stranger to my eyes."
But then I tend to get overly 'sentimental' when listening to words that appeal to wherever my better instincts are buried.
Never having been 'wealthy', and sometimes having been quite the reverse, I have never been in the position of being philanthropical in any real sense of that word and certainly not being brilliant like Mr Yunus I've never had the intellectual 'fabric' to come up with a world changing idea let alone the intellectual and personal drive to bring such an idea to practical and enduring fruition - but I have always been overwhelmed by people I hear about who can and do such things. So my Sunday was uplifted by hearing about one more instance of a great idea and and a great person actually making a real difference to the world by their own thoughts and actions.
Unfortunately the next 'noise' that caught my attention was the article in the Saturday SMH in which Michael Egan was pontificating on how Terria could build the FTTN loosely defined in the current 'tender'.
Now, Stupid Stephen/Crazy Kevin have no credentials whatsoever (other than their crass stupidity) for grandstanding about "....giving 98% of all Australians 12 mbps broadband...." but Michael Egan not only has even less knowledge (if that is in fact possible) but he is the same Labor hack as Dumb and Dumber when it comes to knowing the first thing about telecommunications. Nevertheless, there he was, polluting my weekend newspaper reading making a series of the most ridiculous statements ever made in this piece of arrant nonsense:
http://business.smh.com.au/utter-codswallop-will-not-win-allies-in-the-broadband-war-20080613-2q88.html
Now this ex NSW Labor Party treasurer has been part of the Terria consortium for the proverbial 'five minutes' and he is now an expert on the most complex proposed infrastructure design yet mooted in this country. Talk about hyperbole - there is now a bidder even dumber than the tender issuers. I particularly liked this piece of rhetoric from the old communist aparatchiks of the Labor Party:
"The Government has made its objectives clear. The new network must
provide open access, encourage downstream competition and innovation
and enable services to be as affordable as possible."
Now if Dr Yunus Muhammed (remember I'd just been inspired by listening to what he had to say about addressing poverty in the third world using commercial principles) it might have, almost, made sense - but coming from a grossly over paid, self serving, 'johnny come lately' political hack with zero knowledge about the topic on which he was pontificating it just sounds ridiculous. (as does almost every other statement made in this piece of cr**).
Does ANYONE in Australia seriously believe that ANY purely commercially driven organisation is going to do ANYTHING but make as much money as they possibly can out of any investment they choose to make?
Does ANYONE in Australia seriously believe that REGULATION of a monopoly situation is going to do ANYTHING to stop the monopolist from charging whatever they like and delivering to themselves as much commercial advantage over any competitor as they possibly can?
In this post modernist political world we currently live in (where the giant US commercial entities pay for the president of their choice to start wars for the benefit of its oil and armaments industries and the Europeans starve the third world with agricultural subsidies and turning food into oil) there is clearly a need for those rare individuals such as Yunus Muhammed and governments like those of Bangladesh to use commercially based skills and entrepreneurship to address problems that other commercial entities can't or won't address for "commercial reasons". That is a wonderful concept that transcends either the outdated free market or socialist 'doctrines' which have blighted the planet since the end of the second world war - and probably since 1924 for all I know.
We used to have such things in Australia until the governments of the day sold them.
The problem is: Where is our Yunus Muhammed?
Let's hope someone finds him very soon and he is able to do what so obviously has to be done. - it certainly won't be done by either Terria or Telstra.