Selling a Dead Cat (2)

Mike Carlton in today's SMH sums it up nicely ...

So, would you buy the remains of a used telco from this man [the Prime Minister]? Not bleedin' likely. It is a dead dog. Once bitten, your mums and dads won't now touch the corpse with a barge pole. It will end up, mostly likely, buried in the Future Fund, its inevitably shrinking dividends paying off public service superannuation commitments.

For all its vaunted financial and economic expertise, the Government's incompetence has turned the T3 sale into a fiasco, a textbook exercise in how not to privatise a public asset.

IT NEED not have come to this. The sensible thing would have been to split Telstra in two. [my emphasis]

The company's hardware, all the wires and widgets that deliver telecommunications, should have been kept in public ownership, a national network available to any privately owned telco that wanted to pay to use it.

The Telstra retail business - marketing telephones and internet connections and so on - could then have been privatised to buy those hardware services, competing for them on an equal footing with the likes of Optus. Throw in some legislated safeguards to keep the bush connected to developing technology, and away you go.

My thoughts exactly.