Australia - Telstra lobbying

Telstra wants shackles lifted

TELSTRA executive Phil Burgess has lamented a lack of entrepreneurial spirit in Australia and the "diminished" role of business leaders in shaping public debate.

In a provocative address to the Australian National University last night, the US-born Mr Burgess took another swipe at the competition regulator, claiming it had "fumbled badly" regulation of telecoms.

The man who famously said he would not recommend Telstra shares to his mother also criticised a lack of "open debate" on industry regulation, citing a "gag order" placed on bidders for the Federal Government's multi-billion-dollar broadband scheme.

"The reality is that Australia's telecommunications regime is failing badly under a burden of regulatory overreach," he said.

Telstra's head of public policy and communication, said business leadership was a "fairly low profile calling" in Australia compared to the US, Germany and Japan.

While US business leaders such as GE's Jack Welch or Microsoft's Bill Gates made significant contributors to national debate, Australian executives were largely of the meek kind he said.

He suggested there might be "historical reasons" for this diminished role. Australia's reliance on protectionism and a centralised IR system might have weakened the capacity of business "to act as a counter-balance to the state in terms of civic legitimacy and authority," he said.

In Australia, the "business book genre" also focused more on the downfall of corporate titans, such as Alan Bond, instead of celebrating entrepreneurial skills.

"Result, the civic authority and legitimacy of business leaders is diminished when they speak about the public interest in the public square," he said.

Since arriving in Australia nearly three years ago, Mr Burgess and Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo have campaigned against the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and its chairman, Graeme Samuel.

Maintaining the rage, Mr Burgess attacked the ACCC's "dismal failure" to regulate in the national interest.

He said investment growth in telecommunications was negative over the past three years, if Telstra's expenditure was removed.

"Telecommunications seems to be one of those policy areas where this wonderfully successful New World country seems strangely ambivalent, and anxious, about the future," he said.

Mr Burgess said he and other Telstra executives had been warned that a "public stoush with the Government won't work . . . and that is not the way we do things in Australia".

But what some people called a "stoush, others call public education - and when the public was educated, they can move issues a lot more effectively than all the lobbyists and backroom politics put together", he said.