Let’s all give a big hoorah to John Howard for collectively bumfucking us as communications consumers. This whole Telstra thing is just a joke. Good old PM John has had it in his head the entire time he’s been in office that we don’t need State-owned utilities, and that competition and deregulation will give us a sleeker, competitive communications system.

What we have in practice is Telstra doing exactly the things you would expect a good capitalist company to do when it procures a monopoly – fight for it tooth and nail, then screw over the low-value, high-maintenance customers in favour of the high value ones. I honestly cannot see how regulation is supposed to ensure that Telstra, as a private company, wastes its shareholder’s money in supporting a non-profit activity.

I think that’s really what this comes down to. John Howard seems to be of the opinion that he can regulate Telstra to be altruistic and maintain universal service in spite of the fact that it goes against the basic nature of a private, for profit company. If you want to guarantee something universally to every citizen, whatever it is should be paid for jointly by every citizen.

This is one of the major reasons for having a government in the first place. By arguing for the privatisation of all public utilities, John Howard is basically arguing that Government should be replaced by the courts and legal system, maybe with a small group making new laws, chosen by whoever can pay the most. And so there shall be consumer goods for all, until such time as we fuck up the environment and run out of resources and civilisation degenerates into a post-apocalyptic mess where we kill politicians and eat them for their valuable fat content.