John Linton
.......has made me appreciate that, incomprehensible as it may seem for someone like like me to reach this view, dealing with Telstra is almost certainly going to be preferable to dealing with some new communications monopoly owned and operated by the Federal Government. It seems that the almost 20 years that have passed since the promulgation of the Telecommunications Act is long enough for everyone, most obviously the duplicitous tossers who seek access to the trough, to forget what a really bad idea it was to have the government of the day (whose idea of long term thinking is how to retain access to the trough at the next election) involved in directing the activities of the national telecommunications provider.
I am absolutely no fan of almost anything Telstra does, at least in terms of its dealings with Exetel, which is why we have begun to use the courts in an attempt to get redress for the most obvious of their operational inequities. There is no question that Telstra remains an organisation that is unbelievably hard to deal with and has reached a stage of contented bloatedness where even one of its legal representatives laughed without a hint of ruefulness at the concept that Telstra might like to act in a timely way to the matters being discussed and he thought that was an "OK" attitude for him/Telstra to take. His comment, which I can't remember verbatim, was to the effect that "Oh well, you are dealing with Telstra you know" which apparently made it "OK" to disadvantage a small company "because that's what we do". So I have no liking nor any respect for people who have been tainted by their employer's approach to business generally.
Given the state of Telstra today - a government monopoly that has had 20 years to become something different via legislation, the yapping at its heels of a half dozen or so foreign carriers and the ministrations of the ACCC - no-one with two brain cells to rub together could regard the creation of a new government communications monopoly with anything but horror. It really is a case of "don't those morons ever learn anything?" If you have any sort of sense of humour you must be laughing at the current unedifying concept of that union stand over thug (Krudd's cat's paw Conroy) telling Telstra that their monopoly is bad for Australia and it's to be fixed by one monopoly handing over its monopoly operations to a new monopoly - talk about Alice in Wonderland.
Talking about Wonderland, or some land that must be even lower beneath the surface of the Earth than Telstra and the Federal Government of the day exist, unlike where the majority of humanity resides, there is some other even more ridiculously unaccountable organisation that makes it difficult to believe that the Australian communications industry isn't filled with even more incredible creatures than Cheshire cats, mad hatters and Red Queens. I am referring, of course, to the TIO. As I mentioned the other day - Exetel has attempted for some two years to get the TIO to act as its "charter" determines that it should act with no success. We most recently sent them a sample of over 300 instances where they (the TIO) had acted in ways that, without a shadow of a doubt, were against their own unequivocally clear guidelines which they subsequently agreed were 'errors' on their part and "credited Exetel for the charges they had made in error".
However they refused to accept that the examples we provided were anything but "errors" that were not an indication that there was anything wrong with the calibre and knowledge, the training or the supervision of TIO personnel who had committed those errors even though we advised them that they were merely samples of more than three hundred other identical situations. So, denial and obfuscation and the privileged cloak of 'we can do exactly as we like' (as stated to Exetel by more than one TIO employee) makes litigation the only course available to companies like Exetel....which we have now formally begun.
Apart from the waste of money and time, which is not inconsiderable, the bad taste in your mouth that is generated by being on the end of Telstra's and the TIO's communications makes business life unnecessarily unpleasant. I have had enough direct and observational experience of the Australian 'justice system' to never predict the outcome of any given piece of litigation but I have no doubt whatsoever of the unequivocal correctness of facts we are providing to the various courts involved and have no ability or knowledge to doubt the advice of the counsel our solicitors consulted in preparing the cases.
A feral prime minister and feral government ordained organisations makes business life in the Australian communications industry more complicated, and expensive, than it needs to be.