Commerce Commission Should Throw The Book At Telecom

Telecom risks a fine of up to $300,000 from the Commerce Commission for failing to meet this week’s deadline to provide the Commission with a document spelling out how its competitors will be able to access its copper local loop, which is the vital part of the local loop unbundling ordered by the Government more than a year ago.

The time is long past for the Commission to muck around with Telecom, a past master of procrastination, bluff and brinkmanship. The Commission should purely and simply throw the book at this most recalcitrant of corporate recidivists. $300,000 sounds like a lot of money until you realise that Telecom is predicted to make a $875m-$895m profit in the current financial year, and picked up a cool $2.16 billion in March from the sale of Yellow Pages. In that context a $300,000 fine is parking meter money. If the Commission made it $300,000 for every day over the deadline, then Telecom might start taking a bit of notice (but not much, when placed alongside the billions in profits it has sucked out of the telecommunications cash cow in a very few years).

When Telecom was ordered to unbundled the local loop more than a year ago, it promised to turn over a new leaf and fully cooperate. Yeah, right. It has resorted to its timehonoured practice of dragging the chain and prevaricating, blustering, threatening and trying to bully the Government into letting it do things to suit itself. This was the reason that Telecom was very nearly the winner of the 2006 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand (it came a very close runner up).

As for its stated grounds in asking the Commission to extend the deadline, namely that it was worried about working its staff too hard – when has Telecom ever worried about its staff? Ask the many thousands that it has made redundant. That deserves a special award for hypocrisy.

And what has been its priority in recent months – reinvesting those profits into NZ’s antiquated and overpriced phone network? Nope – chasing further profitable and speculative deals in Australia.

Long suffering captive public of NZ to Commerce Commission – stop mucking around and throw the book at Telecom.

ENDS

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