19 March 2007
In years to come when history is written and people ask who was most to blame for holding Australia back at the turn of the 21st century, it will be hard to go past the Chairman of the ACCC Graeme Samuel.
Single-handedly he has done more than anyone else to stop broadband investment in Australia, pursuing a public campaign pretending 'everything's okay' when in fact we're being left behind the rest of the world.
Australia is suffering from a broadband drought because companies are not investing. Companies are not investing because there are insufficient returns and regulatory uncertainty.
Telstra wants to switch on faster ADSL in exchanges all over Australia and begin work on a new $4 billion fibre network that will boost speeds up to 100 megabits plus. It can't do so because the ACCC can't guarantee it won't hand over the investments of Telstra's shareholders to competitors.
Graeme Samuel's latest trick has been to claim that Telstra can invest by putting in an application to the ACCC for a regulatory undertaking - a 'pass' if you like, to escape the regulator's tentacles.
In other words, every time Telstra wants to invest in something it can go cap-in-hand to the ACCC and beg Mr Samuel not to give its investments away.
We don't think it's the ideal way to go about business. That aside, the process would take years to complete and still be open to the regulator changing the terms and conditions as it saw fit - hardly the certainty you need when you're investing $4 billion of other people's money.
But Graeme Samuel won't have a bar of that and he's doing all he can to pretend the system 'aint broke' at all.
Last week he issued a press release (www.accc.gov.au) citing a case where he claimed Foxtel had "successfully" used the undertaking process to set access arrangements for competitors to use pay TV set top boxes.
Mr Samuel and his deputy regulation sheriff Ed Willet were out telling anyone who'd listen in the media (www.theaustralian.news.com.au) that the cap-in-hand approach had worked for Foxtel and it could work for Telstra too - if only the company would stop playing games!
What they failed to mention was that Foxtel had now wasted five years trying to get an agreement through the ACCC's 'perfect' system and it could still be overturned on appeal.
Where will the rest of the world be in five or even six years time if Telstra has to wait this long using this flawed process to start investing in badly needed broadband infrastructure?
We think it's time Graeme Samuel stopped pretending the system works just fine.
The system is broken and needs to be fixed.
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