ACCC Chairman, Graeme Samuel, got his himself a verbal tangle when speaking with Geraldine Doogue on ABC radio (www.abc.net.au) on the weekend about the competing plans for a high-speed broadband rollout.
His purpose seemed to be to urge transparency and openness in the debate, but a few gaffes revealed him as the principal cheerleader for the G9 proposal.
Samuel: …everyone that is an interested observer and has an interest in this process will be able to see exactly what we’re proposing… sorry, what they’re proposing. What…
Doogue: And that’ll mean pricing and who that…
Samuel: Pricing and how it will be done and what coverage it will have. It’ll be the whole… it’ll be the full McCoy.
Surely when speaking about the degree of exposure of the proposal he should have said the “full Monty” not “full McCoy”? And that bit about the plan “we’re” proposing, well it can only have been the excitement of the moment (and has been removed from the sanitised ABC transcript).
The rest of the interview included several swipes about being left out of the discussions between Telstra and the Minister, and the extraordinary claim that the 2006 talks between Telstra and the ACCC on fibre to the node broke down because Telstra refused to make its plans public.
Economist Henry Ergas, who was representing Telstra at the talks, wrote a letter to the editor of the Australian Financial Review (9-5-07) correcting this important historical point. He said the talks broke down because there was no agreement on whether city telecommunications users should continue to contribute to high-cost rural services, and if so, by how much.
If the press releases and “draft undertakings” issued by the G9 give Mr Samuel some comfort, he must be happy for the network to be built out of paper – because that’s all we’ve seen so far.
The most impressive emanation from the G9 has been the audacity of their regulatory “asks”. Not only do they want to confiscate Telstra’s copper network – paying us $5 a month per line and allowing us to rent each back for $15 a month – they are also demanding a 20 year ban on the construction of competing infrastructure.
What we have is a classic case of the fully Monty versus the real McCoy – G9 baring all but revealing nothing, while on the other hand, Telstra has the expertise, the technology, base network and the financial readiness to build the new broadband network as soon as commonsense reins.
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