SQUEALING TELSTRA FORGETTING HISTORY

TALK about chutzpah with a – very big – capital H for Hypocrisy: Telstra’s CEO Andy Penn moaning about the National Broadband Network charging broadband retailers like Telstra too much to access its fibre.

This coming from the organisation that used to do exactly what Penn is accusing NBN of doing – charging too much. And doing it for 40 or more years.

First, after its separation from the Post Office in 1975 as the country’s still government-owned monopoly, Telecom Aus. You can have any colour telephone you want provided it is black and we will “hose” on charges and (non) service.

Then as Telstra after it was sold to investors and listed on the ASX.

In further contrast to the claimed – and it really is only claimed, by Penn – customer “hosing” by today’s NBN, Telstra used to engage in industrialstrength monopoly-price “hosing” of its customers who in those primitive days had no other option but to cop it.

Telstra was nothing if not an equal-opportunity “hoser”.

It would overcharge its hapless telco competitors who had to buy access to its monopoly, as it then was, copper network.

And it would happily “hose” its own direct retail customers – who, for most of those 40-plus years, were the great majority of ordinary Australians as both individuals and businesses.

I remember well those Telstra profits where it was making over 90¢ of gross profit in the revenue dollar on the humble all-pervasive home phone; and still around (a very lush) 50¢ in the revenue dollar across its entire business, when you added those parts where some competition kept it at least half-honest.

Now true, Penn wasn’t there in those days. He only came to Telstra in 2012, first as CFO and then more recently as CEO.

Before that, he was with another saintly business “charity” – insurance and superannuation giant AXA and its predecessor National Mutual. No “hosing” in those businesses of course.

Penn’s complaint is that because NBN charges “too much” to the RSPs like Telstra, they can barely make a profit on the prices they then charge the retail customer.

Pu-leeze, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. That’s otherwise known as c-o-m-p-i-t-i-t-io-n spells COMPETITION – a strange concept that Telstra in its corporate bones knows is decidedly un-Australian. Or at least, un-Telstra.

Let’s not forget Telstra made its play to be the NBN – before we “got” the NBN on the back of a coaster in a VIP pollie flight – to keep the Telstra monopoly music playing. The play failed and Telstra is, thank goodness, still banned from buying the NBN.

A final word of advice and a caution.

The advice: suck it up Andy.

The caution: the last “person” the NBN should take pricing advice from is Telstra.

TELSTRA WAS NOTHING IF NOT AN EQUAL-OPPORTUNITY ‘HOSER’