">My Big World Of Crap

Must say I’m amused by the faux indignation from Treasurer, Peter Costello, and Communications minister, Helen Coonan, about Telstra’s decision to shut down a bunch of call centres, involving headcount reductions of around 500. What exactly did they expect would happen with a privately owned Telstra?

Given its a pretty bloated company still (imagine how it must have been when it was public service?) what else do people expect competitive pressures to drive, other than cost takeout and profit improvements. Telstra’s job is quite simple … provide customers with world class telecommunications services that are competitively priced, and provide acceptable returns to its shareholders. It does not exist to provide jobs that are not required to meet its business objectives, whether they are in regional areas, marginal seats or whatever. I would argue that this should always have been the case regardless of ownership of the company. Even as a government owned telco, its job was to provide telecommunications services as competitively as possible (whether measured against actual competition or against international benchmarks), not to employ people who are not actually needed to provide these services. If governments want jobs in places like Launceston, Wollongong, Newcastle (and Canberra in the case of these call centres) it is not up to Telstra to provide them if they are not business critical …. they need to encourage growth of other industries which do generate necessary jobs in those places using levers such as incentives and subsidies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 7:18 am and is filed under in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.