Coonan moves to counter Telstra, again

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 10 September 2005 14:12

IT Policy - Regulation

For the second time in a week communications minister, Senator Helen Coonan, has felt the need to issue a statement in response to the public pronouncements of Telstra executives, the latest a speech from it feisty new CEO, Sol Trujillo. Trujillo delivered a lengthy speech yesterday to a Telstra Country Wide Advisory board meeting in which he complained about the regulatory shackles on Telstra and the high costs of compliance.

In her statement Coonan reminded the public of how much Telstra has benefited in recent time from Government largesse aimed at boosting rural communications. "Telstra has received close to $120 million to expand its CDMA mobile phone network, $150 million to provide untimed local calls to some of the remotest parts of Australia and Telstra is a major provider of subsidised broadband services under the Government's $158 million Higher Bandwidth Incentive Scheme (HiBIS)."

Last Thursday she went into damage control mode after Telstra received widespread publicity for its comments on the unsustainability of the USO scheme.