In the short term the Future Fund basically front runs the market and dumps Telstra (I can already hear the naysayers cry ‘Chinese Wall!’).

In the long term Telstra gets smashed into pieces so that in five to ten years time our information technology infrastructure will be owned by foreign enterprises because the domestic firms lack scope, scale and a knowledge base to perform the job.

Are there any other industries we can nail to the cross of competition? Perhaps an ACCC witch hunt can destroy our mining industry, banking perhaps? Don’t forget our retailers!

What a bright future for our children lots of tiny companies with no ecomies of scale trying to compete with global behemoths.

Lots of competition but sorry guys Australian companies will be to puny to win the race.

Fantasic- Thankyou Kevin Rudd!

I did not engage an external auditor in order to trick Telstra. They did it all by themselves. Several times, I advised them that I did not require a double repayment of the refund. They simply refused to correlate my account with BigPond and my phone account, which were merged during a promotion of single billing. Unfortunately, my computer has since failed , else I would be tempted to contribute full details of these messages. Memo to self: Must back up files more often.

No amount of explanation would convince those in charge of the two separate billing systems that there had been a double repayment.

An hillarious side issue was the fact that no account could be transferred between the two (BP and SB) with any balance except ZERO dollars and ZERO cents. I, of course, had a balance which was approximately -$3k. The only way out seemed to be payment by Telstra to me of the balance so that the merging of accounts could take place, after which the credit was again discovered and so the story continues. Double repayment.

The relevant Group Managing Director (nice title) was contacted. Too hard. Emails and a snail mail message ensued. No result.

Eventually, I gave up, drank the proceeds and now live happily ever after.

By the way, I am a simple family man, a private citizen with a phone line or two and normal needs for communication. Nothing fancy. Nothing pretentious. Just an overcharge, twice refunded.

I am not hiding behind an alias. My name is able to be traced very simply. The fact is that, as a country customer of Telstra, my experience has demonstrated that this company is unable to run a chook raffle, a billing system or a phone company.

Telstra shareholders, how do you feel? You own shares in a lemon. It is cactus. If the government’s current actions cause you concern, it is too late. Your past management have demonstrated their inability to run this company. Your money has already gone down the toilet. The current actions are in response to Telstra’s demonstrated failure, not because of some imagined antipathy to private ownership.

Folks, you have backed a loser and the time to settle the score is approaching.

Great job, Senator Conroy! Get on with it!

source - http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/chron/2003-04/04chr03.htm#first

I won’t deny that Labour played a part in the botched process by introducing “competition reforms” that created a protected triopoly between Optus, Telstra, and Vodafone during the 90s. Both parties convinced themselves that this gave us a robust telecommunications industry, when it was anything but.

Telstra could have been structurally separated with little controversy or conflicing interest up until its privatisation, and I remember a lot of voices from the technology industries were calling for it. Unfortunately the economic rationalists had the ear of government, and pork whispers won the day.

This will have many unintended negative consequences as well as the obvious of the shareholders who bought in good faith off the Commonwealth and have now been deceitfully short changed.

I note Bernard Keane doesn’t even bother even alluding to even one of them.

His pretense as as a serious political reporter has for quite some time been no longer deluding me.

It’s fantastic to see some steel balls being affixed to the competition regulators of our country. Next up, supermarkets, petrol, and the media!

The Globalisation experiment is to fail. There will be a massive depression. People will starve. Then there will be the usual huge gobal bust up called war. Australia will likely be divided up or massively fought over because of all the stuff that was laid down four and a half billion years ago that we have been giving away to the commos in China. For nothing.
How you can run up an enormous trade deficit during the boom is why Govt. should lay off Tesltra. They getting nothing, absolutely nothing right!!!!!!!!!!

Such cockups are not the preserve of Telstra. All of the big telcos have billing systems that are what programmers like to call “plumber’s nightmares” — meaning that they have been hacked and patched so often in order to keep up with the byzantine billing plans currently on offer and all of the active historical ones, too, especially for business customers — that nobody can debug them.

The companies that offer to audit your business telecoms invoices can usually find billing errors in your favour and the telcos generally don’t fight their findings.

This will have many unintended negative consequences as well as the obvious of the shareholders who bought in good faith off the Commonwealth and have now been deceitfully short changed.

I note Bernard Keane doesn’t even bother even alluding to even one of them.

His pretense as as a serious political reporter has for quite some time been no longer deluding me.

If this move changes anything so be it. I won’t hold my breath.

I’d rather deal with Centre link.

The business case for the NBN has not been made. As a pork barrelling exercise ther NBN would make John Howard look honest by comparisonn if it is carried out in its initial form. The government to carry out its objectives needs Telstra’s infrastructure which it will force Telstra to provide without consequence to the impact on Telstra shareholders. This is nationalisation by stealth.My comments in relation to trusting governments I think is well founded as the various levels of stupidity related to school infrastructure which have been recently disclosed with referring to to the various lies and deceit peddled by the previous government.

I would be much more sympathetic to the government position if they would take a similar position with oligopolistic service providers like Woolworths and Coles, and the big fuel retailers who by some magic process managed to flex fuel prices in Melbourne without breaching any competition rules. I would be really happy for the ACCC to target these situations as well.

Essentially the government is proposing to finance, using taxpayer’s money, a parallel infrastructure unless it can bludgeon Telstra into submission. This it can do via legislation, which is essentially destroying shareholder value. In the interests of the common good perhaps they could also commence the process also with supermarkets and petrol retailing.

BTW, I didn’t join Telstra from choice - I, along with my partners, was acquired during the Ted Pretty days 0f dot-com startup buyouts.

@Spare Us, you make good points, especially about mums and dad shareholders, but we can’t let that hold us back forever. And you have been listening to much to Sol if you think that only Telstra, of all the companies in the world, can roll out the NBN. And I agree with your point about the NBN, but the NBN is a far better stimulus spend than pokies and flat-screen-TV payout checks. It’s infrastructure. Like roads.

Should we let Telstra hold us back forever? Unfortunately, Telstra has demonstrated that they will not change without the government putting a gun to their head. That’s what Stephen Conroy is proposing to do. Let’s see if (a) he has the guts; and (b) if Telstra makes him pull the trigger.

I guess the ‘mug’ punters aka the Australian Public are just there to be ‘farmed’ and milked by the free-marketeers with some serious financial help from the Government politicians. In case you missed it….Telstra, for all its silly faults - and it has many as do political parties - is the only…ONLY ….organisation technically and financially capable of doing the NBN, however, the Government is too stupid and bloody minded to see that.

So now we have yet another ‘start-up’ Government Telco DIRECTLY competing with a free-market forces entity using billions of public funds to try and break it - Mr and Mrs Average vs the Government - a great way to move this country forward. We could use the same ‘business’ model for the 4 banks, Coles, Woolies, fuel companies, Bunnings, cake shops, cattle farmers, hairdressers…..we could do it all! Yes, how good would that be? Russia and a few others tried that some many years ago…..take it from them…’IT does NOT work’. Somebody needs to remind Sen Conroy of this simple fact….

The BIG loser in this? Not Telstra shareholders…but actually the Rudd Government….simply NOT up to this task of Nation building, not even Nation minding. Mind you nor is the other lot. Maybe we could import a few sensible politicians as well?? Can’t seem to grow any at home…

Conroy may or may not be your favorite minister but he is not a complete goose. He would have known, especially after Godwin’s flight of fancy, that there are whistle blowers who could expose any underhand dealings.

@Angus: At one time Telstra was close to 90,000 employees, following the merger of Telecom Australia with OTC, so bloating was unavoidable and the unions weren’t in a hurry to see their members out of work. Those numbers have reduced substantially since - along with customer service and innovation - but don’t forget to add back the staff in all the functional areas that were outsourced.

Yes, it is the shareholders who will cop it in the neck for this but the move has been telegraphed for a while now so there were chances to get out, unless you took a punt that Telstra would get its way.

As other have said, the separation should have occurred when privatised. I believe the govt of the day had valuations put on both scenarios and opted to flog the one that had an in built premium for being a virtual monopoly. While at the same time claiming to be champions of competition. Where is Dicky Alston now?

Effectively the premium for being a monopoly will now be removed from the share price, along with being discounted over the last few years for the crap management.

I still laugh when I hear Sol’s claim to fame that “total shareholder return out performed the ASX under his managment”. Of course he can only make this claim by including dividends, but money to pay the dividends was borrowed, it wasn’t paid out of profits. You need to be a genius and be paid $30M to be able to do that. Well at least pull it off anyway.

@Spare Us: We are all Telstra share owners (through the Future Fund). But are you seriously arguing that splitting Telstra is somehow equivalent to letting big banks fail? Does the world revolve around Telstra? Are we about to have a broadband (as opposed to liquidity) crunch? Please.

Only two of the contributors are against Conroy’s proposal and they wrote stream-of-consciousness rambles which defy rational analysis.

It seems that Minister Conroy has hit the mother lode with this announcement and that he has something close to 90% of popular support.

Now, who says that the current government has no real policy and is only prepared to take easy decisions?

I can’t wipe the smile off my face. It’s too early in the day for a celebratory beer, but living as I do in the country, I am mightily encouraged by the prospect of improvements, any improvements at all, to the speed, reliability or price of communication services. I only eventually got broadband from Telstra after almost 4 years of paying for a service which was not provided, and after so many twists and turns that I almost gave up altogether. Nice it was to get the eventual four figure refund.

Telstra shareholders take note: This stupid conglomerate even insisted that I accept double refund, having denied that they could make such an accounting error… SAP is a large, German accounting package, etc, etc. Eventually, and after several times in writing telling them of the error in my favour, I accepted the second refund.

If Telstra cannot provide contracted services and then gives out duplicate refunds, how can they make a case for being able to run a real company?

Whoever cames next will be an improvement.