Competitors call on Conroy to rein in Telstra with new legislation UPDATED

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 12 August 2008 12:32

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

In a letter to Telstra's executive director, regulatory affairs, Tony Warren, he said: "Telstra's thus far unilateral assessment of the materiality of the errors in the TEA model may or may not ultimately be accurate. This is beside the point. The issue here is that after repeated claims of increased transparency, Telstra has reserved to itself the ability to release information at a time of its own choosing. That does little to inspire confidence in Telstra's commitment to a transparent process."

Citing this and other correspondence between Telstra and the ACCC that is publicly available the ACCC website , Forman said: "This [correspondence] suggests that Telstra has wilfully presented a flawed model to the Commission and to stakeholders including the CCC, in defiance of the Commission’s requirement that the model should be reliable. It has waited until the last possible moment in the public consultation process to present a new version of the model that may or may not correct some of the errors in the model, knowing that this makes a mockery of the consultation process."

He added that this behaviour by Telstra was in addition to what he claimed were "the problems that the CCC and many other stakeholders had in gaining access to the TEA model in the first place."  According to Forman, "Telstra presented confidentiality agreements to the CCC and others that were clearly unacceptable, and spent weeks, and in some cases months, engaged in disputes about the terms of these agreements."

The CCC is calling on the ACCC to "immediately reject the present Telstra undertakings in order to prevent any further wasting of time and resources" on the basis that "Telstra has not satisfied the Commission that the TEA model is reliable, and that the Commission can therefore not be satisfied that the undertakings are reasonable."

Separately, in its letter to the minister, the CCC is suggesting two possible changes to legislation to address the situation. One would be to allow the ACCC to amend an undertaking into a form that it found acceptable. The second would be to remove the undertakings provision from telecommunications altogether.

Forman said there was now no need for an undertaking in the case of ULLS, because it had been the subject of numerous arbitrations, and if Telstra feared how the ACCC might amend an undertaking it could simply not submit any.