- The Guardian
- Issue #2124
Heard about Optus? Our second-biggest phone company after Telstra is in the Federal Court charged with ‘unconscionable conduct’ selling phone plans and products that people didn’t need, didn’t want, and often couldn’t afford, then using debt collectors to go people for the cost of purchases they shouldn’t have made in the first place. A lot of the customers were vulnerable people; Indigenous Australians living remotely, people with limited English or knowledge of Australian law, people with disabilities which made them vulnerable to misselling.
It’s only last year Telstra was found to have ripped off hundreds of Indigenous customers, conning them into buying things they couldn’t afford and didn’t need. The ACCC talked about “misleading sales practices to vulnerable communities” then too.
This isn’t how privatisation is marketed to the public. Dividing an essential utility like phone services up between different companies is meant to give consumers good choices, and make life cheaper for everyone, while giving government a cash bonus for selling off electricity, water, or telecommunications. Choice is good, isn’t it?
That’s the myth of privatisation. The reality is that capitalists don’t want competition that helps consumers. They want to maximise profit, the first priority for any business under capitalism. That’s why it feels like you need a science degree to understand the information on the side of cereal boxes, or to compare different phone or power plans.
As for the benefit of selling assets, the government gets that exactly once. Once the asset built from the taxes of working people when the phone lines were laid or the power lines were built is sold, that’s it. Sell once, then pay forever.
Once privatised, companies don’t play fair, because they’re in it to win it, not to make people’s lives better. If they can make a few million by tricking people into phone plans they don’t need, they’ll do that.
Another reality of privatisation is that it shields bourgeois politicians from responsibility or blame. They get to play the good guys, on the working people’s side against the evil corporation. The fact that the politicians are the ones who let the corporation run something that working people used to own is somehow left to one side. If the privatised asset is doing okay, people are happy. If there’s a problem, the politicians get to attack it on the working peoples’ behalf, maybe threaten it with fines or loss of contract, but never change the corrupt set-up that allowed the abuse to happen in the first place.
This is usually the point at which concerned liberal commentators tick the company off. One Nine papers’ business columnist has said “big brands must clean up their acts,” and talked about “optics,” in other words how it looks. Telstra was ordered to pay $50 million in penalties after its unconscionable conduct. That didn’t do the trick. Maybe regulations need to be tightened up. Perhaps the regulator needs more resources.
The problem is too deep to be fixed by fines big companies can easily afford, or damage to the ‘brand’ that will eventually be forgotten. The problem is privatisation in the first place. The problem is capitalism.
Unions get massive fines and administration if they obstruct capital. Companies like Telstra or Optus get fines, and the chance to do it again later. That’s what’s unconscionable.
