Nowwearetalking, now we are glad that you are gone

Stuart Corner
Monday, 07 September 2009 11:06

Opinion and Analysis

NWAT was the brainchild of Phil Burgess, Telstra's former regulatory chief and right hand man to former CEO, Sol Trujillo and was launched in December 2005 "to better inform and engage Australian consumers in the debate about the importance of telecommunications to their lives and the national economy."

It has been a vehicle for some truly appalling commentary from Telstra writers the like of which has rarely been seen coming from a major company. iTWire has on more than one occasion seen fit to highlight its worst excess and call for it to be taken down. In February 2007 I wrote : "Nowwearetalking should be an embarrassment to any self-respecting corporation and taken off the air or severely reined in. The fact that it has not been is a real worry.

Optus was a favoured target, often with xenophobic comments about its Singapore ownership. Atug too came in for NWAT's execrable commentary, being described as having "morphed into a mouthpiece for SingTel Optus and other telecom operators who rely on leaching on Telstra shareholder's investments and only care about creaming as much profits as they can in the big city markets."

At one stage in response to some anti-Telstra lobbying NWAT blogger Rod Bruem described this as "a despicable scare campaign" launched by "a SingTel-backed anti-Telstra cartel." Bruem told his readers that: "SingTel Optus funds the lobby groups responsible for this and many other duplicitous anti-Telstra campaigns," that a "rotten, despicable culture is still at the core of that company," and that it was "an arm of the Singapore government, one of the most hideous totalitarian regimes in Asia." This was despite Optus being a member of neither of the two organisations whose lobbying efforts were the reason for the outburst - T4 (Tell The Truth Telstra) and the Competitive Carriers' Coalition.

With consummate hypocrisy, Bruem closed that particular rant with some gratuitous advice for Optus CEO Paul O'Sullivan: "I think it's time you sought some advice on what's appropriate professional behaviour and what's not."

Similar hypocrisy was evident in another attack, this time against Australian journalists' coverage of Telstra's participation in the Federal Government's first NBN tender. He said it "provides plenty of examples that demonstrate how some of Australia's most highly-paid journalists working at the most well-resourced newspapers are seemingly incapable of providing informed, balanced and objective commentary."

Bruem's excesses were simply following the lead set by his boss who delighted in reminding people that Optus was owned by Singapore whose Government, "executed its citizens," conveniently ignoring the inconvenient truth that he himself hailed from a country that does the same and that Telstra had taken a major stake in a company (SouFun) in a country (China) that indulges in legalised murder with greater zeal than almost any other.