The Best Australian Humorous Writing (24 page)

Fairly or unfairly, Lehmann was burdened with a reputation as a cat's paw of Alexander and Anderson. Blair became one of the first departures in a steady exodus that soon after included Bail. Into her role as editor slotted the chief sub, Forbes, although into her office moved the publisher, Myers. This was to be the new budget-
Bulletin
, living within slender means. In fact, the new regime made a positive start, responding with alacrity and special issues to the deaths of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock. Lehmann proved to be an irrepressible enthusiast with a well-developed news sense, honed by covering politics in Queensland and crime in New York. He still rallied a good staff. “There were no slow ants or time-servers at the
Bulletin
,” notes David Haselhurst. “They ran a very lean ship.” He also showed some cojones. When the
Australian
ran a powder-puff profile of the Rudds by Mitchell's wife, Christine Jackman, Lehmann had the temerity to reveal that Rudd was godfather to their first son—quite an act of cheek, given Mitchell's legendary capacity for enmity. The
Bulletin
belatedly got its online house in order under Rod Dalton, a former night editor from the
Sydney Morning Herald
: its “Bullring”, a site dedicated to the election campaign, was informed and irreverent.

When the news did not provide an obvious direction, however, Lehmann struggled, displaying little aptitude for the
Bulletin
's nonnews component. “We need more celebrities,” he would complain. “That was part of my pitch.” So it was that the magazine of Lawson and Paterson published an interminable extract from Geoffrey Cousins's business bodice-ripper
The Butcherbird; then
it ran an interview with the author;
then
it ran a (deftly non-committal) review. So it was that the magazine of May and Low was reduced to Patrick Cook's weekly cartoon for Oakes's column, but still published a flatulent column by Alexander's friend Leo Schofield. Anything more heterodox was a challenge. On one occasion, Skelly planned to take an extract and photographs from Kaavous Clayton's
Abandoned Chairs
, a whimsical collection of images of discarded chairs in incongruous settings. Lehmann hated it. “We're just not on the same page here!” he barked. “I don't care about chairs!”

Perhaps it was hard to care about chairs when there was a publisher so apt to stress how many feet there were under desks. Myers acted like a census-taker, obsessed with staff numbers. A hundred years earlier, the
Bulletin
had 112 employees; with a workforce a quarter the size, Myers now considered it way too large. He even offered himself as a travel writer. Unfortunately, his prose was execrable. There was universal glee when he left, early in the new year. It was short-lived.

Phil Scott took four scenarios to the PBL Media board: sale or closure; business as usual; a radical slimming; a monthly. There was no taste for further cuts, nor was there a zeal for experimentation that might cost money. The bids solicited were circumspect. News Ltd repeated an earlier flirtation with inserting the
Bulletin
in the midweek
Australian
, but pulled back; Lachlan Murdoch probably came closest to putting his hand in his pocket, and might have proceeded had Illyria Holdings not joined the syndicate to take over Consolidated Media Holdings. Yet he would have been caught in the same cleft stick as the Packers. “The problem was that the
Bulletin
no longer had any editorial raison d'être,” says one bidder. “If you reformatted the best content in the
Weekend Australian, Age
and
Sydney Morning Herald
in any given week, you'd end up with something that looked like the
Bulletin
. As for this revisionist bullshit about Kerry keeping it alive … ”

“They stuffed the place up,” complained Kerry Packer of the work of his minions at Channel Nine, towards the end of his life. Mistaking money for faith, investment for imagination, he didn't do a bad job of stuffing up the
Bulletin
, the billionaire with such an uncanny sense of public taste in television steadily and obdurately losing his touch with print. Journalists with a sentimental attachment to a proprietor prepared to lose money have let him off lightly, partly because of their collusion in his faltering vision. The
Bulletin
served in concentrated form a news journalism that is now mass-produced—slick but very similar—with which the public is surfeited. Its failure reminds us that what journalists esteem and what readers value are very different things. In the end it took a fucking long time—but it was always going to fucking happen.

FRANK DEVINE

In my projected memoirs,
Settling Scores: Not a Cricket Book
, I will certainly touch on my life as a Telstra shareholder. Taking into account what I could have earned from investing the money for compounding bank interest over 10 years, I can say I've lost my shoelace on Telstra shares. My holdings are not, nor have they ever been, large enough to threaten my shirt.

True enough I could have made a couple of dollars-a-share profit if I had sold them quickly after accepting the first offer to Telstra customers of shares at $3.30. But, like the other 1.6 million individual owners of Telstra shares and the five million or so dabbling in them through superannuation funds and investment trusts, I was consumed by greed.

This drove me to snap up the second offer of a parcel—well, a thin wad—of Telstra shares at $7.45. Shouting at my computer screen has failed to lift them much above $4.50. There have been dividends, of course, but you don't buy shares in tranches of 600 for dividends, especially not shares in an outfit you hate.

To digress to this matter of hatred, hardly anybody I know is without an ugly memory of Telstra when it was a government-owned monopoly.

Mine involves getting a telephone connection to a new house. Having recently returned to Sydney after several years abroad, I was surprised to learn this would take at least three weeks. That meant nearly a month in which the supplier earned nothing from a new customer, which seemed corporately profligate. When the Telecom technician eventually came, he departed without installing one of the requested plug-in jacks. He returned a week or two later to finish the job and my first awareness of his arrival came from hearing shouting downstairs.

Telecom's emissary was abusing my wife for dobbing him in to his employer for his uncompleted work. His manner was so demented that I stayed home from work for the morning to act as bodyguard and to engage Telecom's man in intermittent philosophical discourse.

When he was finally gone, we discovered—truly and actually— that he had bored a hole in the leg of a chair and run a lead through it.

While appreciating this action, up to a point, as a witty riposte, it did not enhance my confidence in Telecom. I bought Telstra shares partly in the expectation of a profit-driven operation sending forth fewer nutters and furniture molesters.

Telecom's unsavoury reputation has played a part in inhibiting the progress of the company of which I am part-owner. Optus and its associates consider it worthwhile to operate a hate-Telstra website.

In part because its predecessor was so unloved, Telstra has attracted little public support against government attempts to control it, despite having transferred, for a consideration, ownership to me and other investors: in particular, trying to force us to grant competitors access to our fibre-optic network on terms not advantageous to us.

There is a distinct parallel between the behaviour of the government in relation to Telstra and the Bancroft family, former
owners of
The Wall Street Journal
, who were eager to grab hold of Rupert Murdoch's US$5 billion but bizarrely insistent on continuing to run the paper.

The reasons for my avariciously anticipating $30 to $50 Telstra shares, and for the institutions considering them such a safe bet, were: (1) as an established entity in an exponentially burgeoning telecommunications market, Telstra was off to a flying start; (2) the fibre connections to the homes and offices of existing and potential customers.

I heard from an unexpected source the other day, a distinguished free-market philosopher, that a case could be made for the fibre network's being public property because it was built with public money. But an incontrovertible argument is surely that ownership of the network came to me and other investors with our Telstra shares, and was a major inducement to us to buy.

My board of directors took the correct tack in rejecting the Rudd government's offer of $4.7 billion towards our providing fast broadband. Reassuringly recognising their responsibility to shareholders, my board said that, if it seemed good business, we would deliver fast broadband ourselves. We wanted no dealings with government consortiums or partnerships, or regulatory threats.

Of course, fast broadband can now be delivered without wires and the government's $4.7 billion might be useful to an entrepreneur taking the wireless path. With our established fibre-optic network, we would, of course, be the first to kick off. That's the market in action.

If it is considered a national need for Telstra to be government-owned again, the government should expect to buy it back from me. If I'm convinced it's in the public interest, I'll take $25 a share.

CHARLES FIRTH

My mum has been lying to me. It's either her or Telstra, and I always take Telstra at its word, so it must be Mum.

This month marks the first anniversary of Justice Peter Gray's ruling that Optus offers better value than Telstra. Telstra had tried to stop Optus running an ad stating that its $49 Cap Plan for mobile phones was superior in value to Telstra's $40 Phone Plan. In denying that request, Australia's third-most senior Federal Court judge said, in words worthy of any advertorial, “It is undeniable that a consumer would get better value under the Optus $49 Cap Plan. Telstra cannot show to the contrary.”

I read all of Justice Gray's judgements; he's the Helen Wellings of the federal bench. I assume most Australians read his stuff, given that late last year the number of mobile phones we use topped 20 million, which means that even toddlers are now wandering around with them. Which is why I was surprised to find out that my mother was still on Telstra's $40 plan—the very one Gray had so scathingly criticised.

Mum had asked me to come with her to the Telstra shop to help her get a new phone. Telstra had sent her a “lovely note” urging her to renew her contract on the current plan, for which she would receive $150 in “bonus credits”. It didn't mention what bonus
credits were, or how they could be redeemed. But $150 credit did sound like a great deal.

She showed me a copy of her latest monthly bill. It itemised 38 calls lasting between 30 seconds and ten minutes. Most of them lasted no more than one minute. For this, she had been charged a total of $87.33, or about $2.30 per call. What was Mum thinking? Had she not seen
Australian Personal Computer
, which featured a long report on the implications of Justice Gray's ruling? Had she not heeded
Choice
's concise 16-point summary of the pros and cons of pre-paid and post-paid mobile-phone plans?

She admitted that she had been surprised by the size of her bill, especially as Telstra seemed to be charging her twice. After charges for each call, an extra $40 was lumped on top for a service with the line item “Phone Plan $40”. The “nice man” at the local Telstra shop had assured Mum that it was a standard charge. On the back of the bill, Telstra told her that she had saved a full $7.81 by being on this plan. At least she wasn't paying $95.14 for 38 calls.
Then
she'd be a sucker.

I asked her who had suggested that she choose this plan two years ago. That nice man at the Telstra shop, she said. It was then that I had an inkling that my mother could lie to my face. For while it is Telstra's right to create a plan that the Federal Court considers to be poor value, it would be deceptive and misleading, bordering on illegal, if the company then pointed unsuspecting customers to that plan and told them it was the best one for their circumstances. Yet this was what Mum alleged.

The idea was absurd. The corporation that sponsors the Paralympics would not deceive a confused retiree by placing her on the worst-value plan in Australia. What would be its motivation? Money? I find it hard to believe that a company with Sol Trujillo in charge would put profit ahead of decency. Sure, according to the latest OECD figures Australia has the third-most expensive mobile-phone service in the world. But Telstra only has a 45% share of the
market; it's not as if it exercises huge and anti-competitive power. I've seen the ads: Telstra's just in it for rustic farmers and bronzed surf lifesavers.

I was angry. In the Federal Court case, Optus had alleged that Telstra was pushing its less-informed customers to sign up to deals such as the $40 Phone Plan. I had dismissed these arguments as the rantings of a crazed foreign company—as Telstra points out on its “grass-roots campaign” website
www.nowwearetalking.com.au
, Optus is foreign-owned. And not just foreign-owned, but Asian-owned. By the Singaporean government. Which is Asian. And foreign.