Telstra: Howard's crossed wires

What was that about the Howard Government being a great economic manager? It has stuffed up the sale of Telstra from the beginning and there's probably more disarray and disaffection to come. The root cause of its mismanagement of the telco is clear: its obsession with privatisation for its own sake.

It's a mistake to imagine that Sol Trujillo and his amigos are a bunch of crazy Yanks who just don't understand the way the game works in Australia.

Equally, though Telstra's share price has fallen by about a third in the year or so that Trujillo has been in charge, it's a mistake to imagine he's been deliberately talking the share price down.

Trujillo has been doing just what he did as an American telco executive: whatever it takes to extract from the government and its regulators the best possible deal for his company. That's precisely why Telstra's board hired him. It has been doing just what Telstra has always done: fighting to protect its monopoly privileges.

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