It's been a while between blogs, however rumours I'd been gagged by the Lundy/Forman legal team are absolutely without foundation! As you may have noted from comments elsewhere on this site, I’ve been enjoying an extended break from Telstra on a family holiday in Europe.

Depending on your view of the world, Europe is either regulatory Nirvana or regulatory hell. For Graeme Samuel and the hundreds of bureaucrats employed by the ACCC, Europe is the cradle of civilisation and Brussels is the font of all knowledge.

Canberra’s regulation control freaks would no doubt salivate at the latest scheme dreamt up by Europe’s health bureaucrats that I came across while travelling in Britain.

At a cost of millions of dollars, teams of council inspectors are being sent out to local fish and chip shops to replace the salt shakers with new Government-approved versions with much smaller holes. The thinking is that this will reduce salt intake and transform the nation’s health.

But sadly it has backfired and the Brits are simply screwing the tops completely off the shakers and piling heaps more salt onto their takeaways – proving yet again that consumers will always avoid crazy regulation if ever there’s a way.

This regulatory madness reminded me of what happened when the ACCC was given the task of setting the prices competitors should have to pay to access Telstra's infrastructure. The bureaucrats simply copied the prices set by the regulator in the UK, converting the pounds sterling price to Australian dollars! The fact that Britain has three times the population and would fit into Australia 32 times is of course immaterial to these geniuses. I wonder how many 'fact-finding' trips it took for them to come up with this solution.

Arriving back in Australia, I was disturbed to find the craziness continues with even more new regulations and the ongoing campaign to dismember Telstra, simply because British Telecom reckons it’s a great idea. Meanwhile the ACCC still hasn't got its head around setting fair prices for accessing Telstra infrastructure based on real Australian conditions.

Why? Because it suits the regulator to simply make up prices that give Telstra’s competitors cheap access, in its misguided belief this will eventually help re-shape the market in Australia and slowly reduce Telstra’s 'monopoly profits' and ‘market dominance’. (Soviet-style central planning didn’t really go out of fashion following the collapse of the Berlin wall)

Many Australians I know think this sort of top-down market control is a good thing, blissfully unaware of how it is stopping investment and holding the country back. The ACCC won't back away from its attempts to micro-manage the market even though the evidence is there that its not working and most consumers are prepared to pay a little more to get superior and more reliable service from Telstra, rather than risk the type of network melt-down suffered by Optus customers recently.

Thankfully I wasn’t here for that disaster or the ACCC’s latest public attack on Telstra, which was equally appalling.

The bureaucrats found a couple of minor problems with Telstra’s own cost model calculations, so they launched a media campaign to attempt to discredit the entire model and wreck Telstra’s reputation at the same time.

I'm told the ACCC has actually started to develop a model of their own, but it is being put together in a locked up room in some dark, secret basement in the UK (where else?) There is zero transparency, zero openness and no-one in the industry knows what is going on.

This is in stark contrast to when Telstra began building its cost model and held briefings for all wholesale customers and gave them the chance to comment.

You'd think that while the ACCC's Rolls Royce is still being built in England and is yet to be imported, surely it could sit down with Telstra now and sort out the alleged 'faults' in the Holden?

That would seem fair and reasonable - two words that don't usually apply when it comes to the ACCC's approach to Telstra.

And to top it all off I come home to the news that Graeme Samuel has been appointed to lead this fine organisation for three more years.

It’s really great to be back.