The time we watched it take 6 men, with 3 vehicles 2 days to paint a twin public phone box, was the time I knew we had to get rid of government owned, union controlled so called businesses.

Yes it was in the days when the phones were run by the PMG, or Telecom, or what ever pretend business name they used for the holiday camp run on tax payer funds.

Even after reducing manning by 60% Telstra was still over staffed by about 100%.

Look at any government organisation, & you'll find the same overmanning, or worse. No wonder we're going broke.

Yep, I remember the PMG.
I remember they used to have a depot in just about every half decent country town.
I remember they'd get out in the middle of the night to get your phone back online.
These days it takes a week or 10 days, depending on when the next crew from Melbourne is due on their travels.
And you get to have such fascinating conversations with people who can barely speak english.

Yes grim, & it cost a days wages for a 5 minute call to Melbourne. An over seas call was a kings ransom.

On second thoughts, perhaps ruinously expensive phone costs did have one good side effect. Overseas calls were far to expensive for over seas call centers to be viable.

Funny, I don't recall anyone thinking 5c for a phone call being ruinously expensive.
I do recall when the CEO of the ANZ bank was getting over a million dollars a year, the poor old CEO of the Commonwealth was collecting a measly $300k.
There's an area I would like to see our pollies show some leadership in, rather than happily following 'the marketplace' and pegging their salaries to the private sector.

Dear Killarney,

Possibly the Greens I was mingling with a decade ago were cut from a different cloth but to call them small business friendly back then would have been a stretch. Perhaps the policies are different now. That isn't to say I didn't admire many Greens for their passion and commitment.

However we shouldn't be under any illusion that the Greens don't know how to play really nasty politics.

 I was incensed enough with their tactics after one election to have vowed I would never join the party.

During the lead up to a Federal election the Greens suddenly and viciously targeted our candidate. As campaign manager I had to deal with her in absolute tears wanting to throw it in after a particularly nasty email attack from a Green party member. A couple of other incidences of similar nature really set the tone but a further act of bastardry occurred. 

Traditionally the Greens and Dems had put each other above the majors on their respective how to vote cards. We rocked up on election day to discover our candidate had been placed near the bottom of their cards. I took it quite personally until I learned that in over a third of the seats the Greens had placed Dems below either the Libs or Labour.

I later received apologies from local Greens who were pretty ashamed of what had occurred but said the instructions had come from the top. They even conceded the reason for targeting our candidate was because she was deemed vulnerable to being upset. It still rankles deeply.

They certainly are not the angels that they would have us think and I further believe the Democrats, on the whole, remained more honorable in their own behavior.

@ Hasbeen and Grim
Fascinating conversation, but Australians are still being hideously overcharged for telephony and woefully under-serviced. Sign a waiver to be released from the Customer Service Guarantee so you can get decent services without paying hundreds of dollars in connection fees or seriously overpaying in service charges and you still have to wait forever to get connected. Overseas call centres are made possible via internet technology, not land line call costs. The old thing didn't work, the current thing doesn't work, but that's a different topic for another blog post.

@ Killarney and csteele
Have to agree that the Greens absolutely do know how to play dirty politics. Indeed I would argue that they know far more about how to play dirty politics than do substantive issue politics - and it would seem to be the focus of their staffing and organisational structure.

However, these two are very different organisations - again, the psychology of the people in these organisations is very different. I'm not so sure that the Democrats are an appropriate warning for the Greens. I think the Greens are on the slide/have peaked - but they need to know their base and their org and take care of themselves, rather than study the Democrats - just as the Democrats need to know their base and take care of themselves, rather than study the Greens.
-KC