Government to consider Telstra Split
Minister considers Telstra split (The Age)
“Turning Telstra’s infrastructure into a separate business will be one of the options in a review of plans to fully privatise the telecommunications giant, according to the new federal Communications and Information Technology Minister, Helen Coonan.“
This is the first sensible thing I’ve heard coming from the Howard government in a while. It has been clean to a lot of people right from the start that handing over Australia’s entire taxpayer-funded telecommunications infrastructure network to a single private entity was not a good thing for competition. If infrastructure is moved back into a government entity providing access to all telecommunications companies on equal terms it should see consumer price reductions all around. I have no idea how the Liberals would sell this idea to the Telstra share holders, especially the ones who bought into the Telstra 2 float. Removing much of the infrastructure from Telstra will surely hurt their share price, and in turn the government’s image with shareholders. It is however something that should be looked at very closely if the Government is serious about having telecommunications competition in this country.