The wisdom of Phil Burgess, brought to you by the WSJ

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 05 November 2009 04:32

Opinion and Analysis

Telstra's erstwhile mouthpiece, Phil Burgess, has been at it again, peddling his views on the Australian Government, the ACCC and Australian telecommunications in general to anyone who will give him a hearing and, preferably, disseminate his views to as wide an audience as possible.

This time it is Wall Street Journal columnist, Holman W Jenkins Jr whose ear has been bent by Burges and who has repeated those views in his WSJ column : not as his own, or even Burgess' opinion but as fact.

The headline: "Australia's Broadband Blunder; Government tries to seize the Internet's backbone," sets the tone of a piece in which Jenkins tells us, without any reservation or qualification whatsoever that: "The government wants to spend $39 billion to deliver 100 megabits to every household in the next decade, without the slightest idea how it might be done commercially or whether customers, who already can get 21 megabits through wireless in most of the country, would be willing to support NBN's huge costs." (Excuse me while I fall about laughing)

Then he tells us that the 'sin' of Sol Trujillo was "to carry out the mission given to him...make Telstra a "private sector, fast-moving company."

According to Jenkins "He did so. Head count was slashed (so was the share price but let's not talk about that, shall we). Aging and neglected infrastructure was upgraded. Three different wireless platforms were junked and replaced with the fastest, most-advanced 3G network in the world." Well I count those three wireless platforms as CDMA, 2G GSM and 3G at 2100MHz. Last I heard two of them were still with us.

Similarly his accounts of Telstra's battles with the ACCC over access prices leave no room for nuances. It's simply " [Telstra] took regulators to court over mandates requiring it to lease its network to competitors at knockdown rates."

Worse than this, he goes on to paint Australia not as a robust democracy with a strong political opposition and with numerous diverse and vocal interests across the spectrum but almost as an oligarchy. "Australia lacks America's bottomless think-tank and K Street resources for publicising policy differences. Its parliamentary government puts all the policy levers, including a ready resort to secrecy, in the ruling party's hands. Australia is a small nation, with a small elite that tends to place limits on burn-the-bridges debate."

Maybe Burgess is getting Australia mixed up with Singapore. That's the even smaller nation whose cardinal sin, in Burgess' eyes seems to have been that its majority government-owned telco owns Optus. Oh yes, and that it "executes people".

Jenkins tells his readers: "Mr. Burgess no longer lives in Australia and no longer works for Telstra and he certainly doesn't have the appreciation of most of the Australian media (at least Jenkins got that bit right!) - but, by keeping up the fight, he just might be helping Australians avoid a terrible mistake."

Well, Jenkins is entitled to his opinions, and so is Burgess, but Jenkins is not entitled to present Burgess's opinions as fact. If Jenkins wants to take a position on the NBN, Trujillo's achievements or anything else to do with Australian telecommunications he needs to do a bit more research before telling his readers that "The NBN is a tremendously awful idea."