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Issue No. 143 05 July 2002  
E D I T O R I A L

Bad Bosses
It could only come from Tony Abbott: an impassioned defence of bad bosses that manages to dismisses the experience of every worker who has ever been done over at work.

F E A T U R E S

Interview: Media Magnet
Labor's communications spokesman Lindsay Tanner on Telstra, pay TV, Murdoch and Packer and other media dilemmas.

Bad Boss: Abbott's Heroes
The first nominee in our Bad Boss quest is a man who runs his call centre as though it were a primary school classroom.

Technology: All in the Family
LaborNET's tentacles continue to spread with this week's launch of the New Zealand Council of Trade Union's site.

International: New Labour's Cracks
The British labour movement has plunged itself into another round of tit-for-tat insults flying between the Blair Government and the trade unions, reports Andrew Casey.

Economics: Virtuality Check
Is the Internet Bill Gates' guide to wealth and power or the key to liberation from alienation and corporate power? A new book weighs the arguments.

History: Necessary Utopias
Neale Towart looks at the impact of the Robens Report to argue that worker control of industry is where OHS should be heading.

Poetry: Let Me Bring Love
The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the Honourable Tony Abbott, has made an offer that the Australian worker will find hard to resist: 'where there is hatred, let me bring love'.

Review: How Not To Get It Together
Together is a belated reminder that it takes more than high ideals and the right intentions to turn a commune into a community.

Satire: NZ, UK Added to Australia�s Migration Zone
In an effort to increase support for its plan to remove 30,000 islands from the Australian migration exclusion zone, the federal government has added New Zealand and England to the list of excluded islands.

N E W S

 Revealed: The Evidence Cole Won�t Touch

 Search for Bad Bosses Begins

 WorkCover to Set Up Crimes Unit

 Electricians Oppose Family-Busting Conditions

 Blue-Collar Blokes Back Mat Leave

 Murdoch Telegraphs Contracts Push

 Abbot Changes Rules for �Employer Advocate�

 Gucci's Label Tarnished

 Funding Cuts Drives Academics Mad

 Star City Casino Strike On The Cards

 Chifley Planners Lose Benefits

 Qantas Staff Sick of Shivering

 Regional Councils Call Jobs Summit

 Kiwi Ex-Pats Targeted for Poll Push

 Shangri-La Workers Still Fighting

 Korean Unionist Freed

 Activists Notebook

C O L U M N S

The Soapbox
The Bush Telegraph
Telstra�s poor performance in the bush is not just about reception, argues the CEPU's Ian McCarthy

The Locker Room
The Tennis Racket
You would think that child labour would have gone the way of bus conductors and public telephones that work, but this is not necessarily the case, writes Phil Doyle.

Bosswatch
Capitalism in Crisis
The collapse of a US telco has sent shockwaves around the globe and undermined trust in a system that rewards hype and dishonesty.

Week in Review
Between the Sheets
This column is heartily sick of being called solid, reliable and old-fashioned so Jim Marr gets with the program and discovers this is, in fact, an up-and-down, in-and-out sort of world�

L E T T E R S
 Lessons from Air Disaster
 Buggering the Bush
 The Great Giveaway
 Down and Out
 Why I hate Telstra
WHAT YOU CAN DO
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Interview

Media Magnet

Interview with Peter Lewis

Labor's communications spokesman Lindsay Tanner on Telstra, pay TV, Murdoch and Packer and other media dilemmas.
 

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The future of Telstra is one of the real stand differences between the ALP and the Liberal, what Labor values have you applied in developing your plan?

The primary Labor values that are appropriate here are that telecommunications are essential services. In order for people to be able to participate fully in our society they've got to access to some reasonable telecommunication services. That requires a major role for government and in this case public ownership. So the core Labor value that's appropriate here is the role of government to ensure that all Australians have got access to decent telecommunications services.

What's the rational behind the solution you've come up with?

Well, I've actually floated a variety of possible options, one of which has got quite a lot of media attention, most of the others have been ignored, as is usually the case with the Australian media. I have not expressed any particular preference for any of those options.

They essentially cover two fields, one is the separation of Telstra's wholesale or network activities from it's retail activities, which could be simply by separating Telstra internally so that you've got two separate divisions that have to deal with each other at arms length. This is how British Telecom runs and it's how Telia in Sweden runs. You could take it a further step and actually separate Telstra into two companies. One that runs the network a bit like the roads system, and the other that delivers the service in competition with Optus, AAPT and everbody else, a bit like Road Transport companies using the government roads system. That's one set of options.

The second set of options looks at Telstra's gradual expansion into non-telephony areas like the media and entertainment, and proposes that that needs to be restrained for competition reasons. This would ensure that we don't have a single company, which the government wants to be a private company, totally dominating not only telecommunications, but also the media and information economy. Telstra already is the dominant player in Foxtel, it tried to buy the Nine Network a couple of years ago, it still has that ambition lurking on the back shelf, and it could go out and buy virtually all the Australian media and barely notice the difference because it's so big and it's so lightly geared.

I believe that would a disaster for the Australian media and for competition in a critical sector of the Australian economy to have a single company completely dominate everything, and to have the monopoly in telecommunications gradually move over into the media, and I think it needs to be resisted very strongly. Therefore, one of the other possibilities in this debate is to get Telstra to withdraw from Foxtel, or sell out of it's internet activities and use the proceeds to buy back some it's involvement in the network or it's other core activities.

The most extreme option of this kind has been floated by Professor John Quiggin, who suggests that Telstra should sell it's mobile business, it's Pay TV business, it's internet business and the proceeds that will accrue to the government from that could be used to buy back the private shares in Telstra, so you would end up with a 100% government owned Telstra, that would pretty much restrict it to it's traditional network and telephony business. So in other words, it would look like Telecom 20 odd years ago.

There are also other possible scenarios like splitting Telstra into regional telecommunication companies, somewhat similar to what the United States and Canada operate, or facilitating competition from other networks, building, rolling out new networks. There's a range of possibilities, and I have very deliberately avoided expressing a preference for any of them, because what I've tried to do is provoke serious broad public debate about the future, built on the premise that we have serious problems, and built on the premise that privatising Telstra will simply make those problems worse, not better.

One of the key stakeholders, given that it is partly privatised, are the shareholders. How much influence does the share price over the entity that currently is Telstra inevitably have on any policy that you come up with?

Well, one of the critical issues that we have to address is ensuring that the interests of the shareholders are protected. They have legal protection under the constitution and also the corporations law, and obviously that requirement has to be honoured. But more broadly, for a whole range of reasons, both of principle and political practicality, it is critical that any major reform strategy that Labor seeks to adopt does not significantly disadvantage the Telstra shareholders. So that's one of the very important issues that are in the mix, but there are a whole lot of other issues. What we have got to do is to try and build a reform strategy that takes into account all of these factors.

Your paper has sparked concern within the Telstra unions, particularly the idea that the infrastructure is the least profitable part of Telstra and to separate this from more lucrative sections would affect job security.

Well, the fixed line network, which is the core of Telstra's business, and is the core of our telecommunications system in this country, is essentially as profitable as it's allowed to be. Currently it's a monopoly. The government claims that if you separated Telstra and you had the government owning the fixed line infrastructure, the network, that this would leave taxpayers with a dud asset. This is simply untrue, there is no basis for making those claims. It is reasonable to anticipate that the network is going to be at the core of Australia's telecommunications systems for some time to come.

It's also ironic that the government is trying to claim that this particular strategy would both be a disaster for Telstra's minority shareholders and a disaster for the taxpayer who ended up owning the network. Now, they can't have it both ways, if they're saying that separating Telstra and having the government own the network would take out all the good bits and give them to the private shareholders and leave the government with the less profitable bit, then they can hardly claim that that's a disaster for private shareholders.

In partly privatising Telstra, the Howard government has created one of Australia's largest companies, how is it performing as a corporate citizen?

I can't really comment about Telstra's performance on things like donations to charity and those matters. Talking to the unions I think it's industrial relations performance is pretty ordinary, it certainly plays a very aggressive role in it's industrial relations, and has been an aggressive promoter of AWAs and has actively discriminated in favour of people agreeing to take AWAs and against people choosing to remain under collective agreements. The person who is responsible for that is now an Industrial Relations Commissioner. So, certainly from industrial relations point of view, if you talk to people in the union, it's difficult to describe Telstra as a good corporate citizen.

In terms of it's dealings with both consumers and with other competitors who are getting access to it's network, I think Telstra plays the game very hard and I think it relentlessly pursues it's interests and it uses its size and muscle to basically prevail wherever it can. Now, I'm not unduly critical of Telstra for doing that, in the sense that if we the legislators of the nation set a set of rules, and there is a major player who plays by those rules and they play the game hard, and play it to their own advantage, well it's our job to, if we think it's necessary, to change the rules.

Given the current share price in Telstra, as well as I guess, comments from your colleague Mark Latham, what are your views on the broader idea of employee share ownership?

The employee share ownership schemes we've had in the past have been basically tax avoidance schemes reflecting an economy and a society that is gradually disappearing. They reflected the world where people stayed within the one large employer for many years and made some sense in that sort of world, but most people now do not live in that kind of world, do not inhabit that kind of employment relationship. I believe that employee share ownership schemes were almost invariably driven by tax avoidance desires on the part of employers, and were not necessary in order to give employees a share of company profits. So there is no reason why companies can't provide bonus schemes based on the company's performance for they're employees, and some companies do.

Mark has floated some new possible ways of approaching these proposals, and I'm looking forward to engaging in the debate: I have an open mind on such proposals, but as I've indicated, I start from a fairly sceptical position.

The ACCC is currently grappling with the future of pay TV in Australia, just going back to your broader ideas on Telstra, is there a similar paradigm that could be acquired here?

There are certainly some cross over issues, and of course Telstra is directly involved in both, and there is a clear linkage. The ACCC's activities do actually deal with competition issues in both media and telecommunications. So one of the big concerns about the Optus/Foxtel deal is that it may present Telstra with an unfair competitive advantage against it's competitors in telecommunications by providing it with a situation where it can bundle it's product in a way that it's competitors can't. In other words they could include the Pay TV as part of a bundle and people pay a single bill, and get cross subsidies within the products and discounts and so forth. So there clearly is a linkage between the two sectors and I have a concern about Telstra's ambitions in media, it is so big and so powerful that it has the capacity to establish a monopoly position in the media.

One possible scenario, if you put together the government's stated policy with the stated ambitions of the players, is that we could end up in this country where there are basically two totally dominant commercial media players. In one corner, Telstra and all of the PBL Nine Network interests including the interests in Foxtel, and maybe John Fairfax thrown in for good measure, and maybe a number of radio stations they can pick up for petty cash. In the other, News Limited with maybe Channel 7 and however many radio stations. All you'd be left with in the commercial media sector, of any size and magnitude, would be Channel 10 out on its own as a pretty tiny competitor relative to those two giants.

If the government privatises Telstra and gets it's cross media ownership laws through, then that scenario is possible and we could end up in a situation in this country, where we've literally only got two media organisations dominating over 90% of our commercial media. That would be a disaster for free speech, for public debate and for the health of our democracy, and that's why the question of Telstra's privatisation is a much bigger question than just about services in regional Australia. Services in regional Australia are a fundamental issue, there's no question they would go backward if Telstra is sold, just as the banks have deserted regional Australia, but that's not the only issue. The prospect of creating a giant private monopoly that totally dominates the information economy is a real one and that's where government policy is heading.

In framing communications policy, how influential are those media interests like the Packers and the Murdochs? Does their media influence play on your mind when you are planning policy?

Well, certainly it doesn't, from my point of view, but I can't really comment about others and history suggests that those players have been quite influential. We can only speculate about what the basis of that influence may have been, but there's no question that they are formidable players in the public debate on these issues. They put their position strongly and effectively and I always take the approach of judging issues by their merit. We need to keep in mind that often there are conflicting positions across the media landscape here, so what may suit one major player will not necessarily suit another. So it's not quite as simple as the sometimes imagined conspiracy with Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch lining up against everybody else. The situation is usually a good deal more complex than that. I do everything I can to judge these issues on their merits. I'm not frightened of taking on the big players, I've been relentlessly critical of Telstra on a number of fronts, I've just been highly critical of Channel 9's sports coverage, and I've got quite a lot of media coverage about that. I think there are things that need to be criticised and there are people in the community who are unhappy, and there are issues that need to be pursued. So I'm certainly not going to back away from dealing with issues on their merits and representing consumers, just because there's somebody in the road who happens to be pretty powerful.

On the broader issue of party reform, can you understand the reactions from within the union movement, to the move to reduce union influence within the ALP?

I can understand the reactions, I think the issue has been inflated beyond it's importance. I think there's been some unfortunate comments from some people after the election, which seemed to imply that somehow the trade union movement was to blame for Labor losing the election, which I think is completely absurd. I think the fundamental issue here is not 60/40 or 50/50, the fundamental issue here is, what is the Labor Party going to do to attract and retain more genuine members? To give it's members a serious say in it's internal processes including the right to vote directly in elections for the key party positions and the right to participate much more fully in party life and activity and ensure that things like branch stacking are relegated to the history books.

Those are the key issues. I'm relaxed about 50/50, I frankly think that the issue from 60/40 to 50/50 will make not much difference, there are some branches that have 50/50 already so I do not see it as a fundamental change, but I see it as a reasonable change, if it is done in the context of major reform on other areas like the party membership. So I don't particularly reject it, but what I do reject is the suggestion that in some way this is a reaction to perceived failings on the part of the trade union movement. The union movement is of fundamental importance to the Labor Party. It is the Labor party's backbone and without it we would be completely adrift and substantially politically worse off. There will always be disagreements, and differences of view and tensions between the unions and the ALP, because ultimately we're answering to slightly different constituencies, and that problem has increased because of the decline in overall union membership. But these things can be managed, can be dealt with and any major political party that seeks to govern, that seeks to win a majority of the vote is always going to have those kinds of tensions and difficulties within it's own backyard, because it's covering a very large and diverse range of people.

Given that there will be some push to reduce union influence on the party floor, what trade off do you see the party being able to offer the union movement? Is it just a case of taking away something, or are there things that the ALP can offer the unions in recompense?

Well, I really wouldn't be approaching the issue of party reform from that angle, from the angle of trade off and quid pro quos, I think that that sort of approach is the kind of thing that has tended to get us into difficulty in the past, has tended to create inefficient party structures. For example, back in the eighties we made some changes to the national executive which ended up creating a national executive of about 30 people, but involved all sorts of little deals and quid pro quos, and it was totally unrepresentative, the structure was cumbersome and thankfully about six or so years later, we realised that that was crook and introduced the new streamlined system of 20 people on the national executive all elected directly by proportional representation by the national conference.

I wouldn't approach theses issues from that sort of perspective. I'd look at the total package' and I'd ask: what should a modern, progressive, effective, inclusive Labor Party look like? What are the key ingredients that should make up a party organisation that is effective, inclusive and has substantial numbers of members and genuine trade union affiliation and operates in a politically worthwhile way? That would be my starting point, not the notion of trading between different rules.

Finally, on the reporting of politics, how do you rate that performance of the Canberra gallery in recent times?

I think that the Australian media in general, but the press gallery in particular, have a lot to answer for. There is an ever increasing dynamic in Australian politics that reporting is governed by entertainment and titillation, not by information. Now that element is always going to be there, but it's just getting worse and worse, so that we now have a situation where it's harder and harder to get public debate about genuine issues or to get serious coverage about genuine issues that do matter to people. It's very easy to get on the front page if you abuse somebody, or if you somehow have some sort of sexual innuendo hanging over your head.

I think the Australian media, in it's reporting of national issues, is deteriorating badly, and that we have now got a reporting process, particularly by the gallery, that treats Australian politics as if it were world championship wrestling, and its simply is looking for the theatrics. I think a lot of our contemporary journalists are nothing more than theatre critics, who are really just interested in reporting the 'oohs' and the 'aahs' and the name calling and all those kinds of things, and by doing so, they encourage that kind of activity, they pump it up.

The more and more that people are rewarded with front page coverage and saturation media for misbehaving or for saying outrageous things, the more and more they'll do it. The end result is you get a degradation of Australian public life and you get a degradation of political debate, and the notion that ordinary people want that is completely fallacious. When people ring up talkback radio, by and large they're ringing up about issues, they're ringing up to complain about crime, they're ringing up to complain about the state of their local school, they're ringing about having to wait six hours to be seen in casualty at their local hospital. It's completely out of control, where even the so called serious newspapers are devoting huge amount of resources and coverage to ultimately peripheral things, that are portrayed purely as entertainment and titillation and are completely irrelevant to governing the country and to making people's lives better.


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