Telstra goes offshore for no other reason than the bottom line. AU can,t compete with the peanuts that gets handed out in asian countries.
Call centers are labor intensive, if you want that fixed it will have to come from legislation. It,s a world market, so you just be careful of imported soup bones rectub.
Manufacturing has not gone offshore, the mass produced items that was developed here has gone offshore, for cheaper labor. It,s all got to do with the bottom line.

extracted from
http://employmentpolicy.org/topic/23/blog/if-it-sounds-too-good-be-true-what-you-need-know-don%E2%80%99t-about-privatizing-infrastructur

at this very moment, state and local governments are contemplating signing contracts leasing their infrastructure for 50, 75, or even 99 years.[or have signed contracts]..that restrict their rights to inspect/repair or replace infrastructure paid for with public money.

rather than making money on just tolls and fees, private contractors make their money through big tax breaks and by squeezing state and local governments for payments..for the life of the contracts.

In fact,tax breaks explain why the deals last generations.

One tax break for leases that last longer than the useful life of the infrastructure allows investors to write off their investment in just over a decade.

A second tax break lets private companies issue tax-free bonds to finance their deals. While tax-free bonds and tax breaks make it less expensive to finance these deals, the downside is that governments lose tax revenue.

Losing tax revenue puts government budgets deeper in the red and worsens problems privatization was supposed to fix.

But that’s not all. Infrastructure privatization contracts are full of “gotcha” terms that require state or local governments to pay the private contractors.

For example, now when Chicago does street repairs or closes streets for a festival, it must pay the private parking meter contractor for lost meter fares. Those payments put the contractors in a much better than the government was. It gets payments, even though Chicago did not get fares when it had to close streets.

Highway contractors can be entitled to payments if there is an accident on the highway and if the police, fire, and emergency crews do not give “appropriate” notice and do not perform their emergency work in a way that is “reasonable under the circumstances”. And, given the vagueness of those standards, states and cities may end up paying just to avoid the costs of litigation.

Highway privatization contracts also often include terms that forbid building “competing” roads or mass transit. Some even require making an existing “competing” road worse.

All of these contract terms put the public safety and well being last and the investors’ profits first. And, although infrastructure privatization proponents claim that the deals transfer risk from the public to the contractors, a fair reading of the contract terms shows that this is not the case. State and local governments lose control of their destinies and communities, while giving private investors power over our new dollar democracies.

These problems will persist even when the private contractor does a good job in maintaining the infrastructure and providing good public access to it. But contractors have not always done a good job in keeping their agreements.

Shortly after it took over the Indiana Toll Road, the private contractor put sand-filled barrels in turn-arounds with no notice to the state. State officials begged and pleaded for the barrels to be removed, so police and emergency crews could get to accidents and deal with other public safety problems as quickly as possible. Those pleas fell on deaf ears, while the turn-arounds remained blocked for months.

Or consider the poor people of Auckland, New Zealand. Their government had become enamored of privatization, because they had been told that the private sector always provided better service at lower cost. The private company that bought the electrical service for Auckland decided to save costs by eliminating backup power, by not replacing parts of the system that were years past their normal life, by doing no maintenance, by having no electrical cables in reserve, and by terminating its repair crews. When they were terminated, the crews left NZ to find work elsewhere. All these decisions were made to increase company profits.

Those decisions may have lowered the company’s costs, but at a huge price, most of which it did not bear when the power cables to Auckland’s central business district failed

Banks, stock exchanges, restaurants, and all functions that depended on electricity were hard hit. Water, sewage, and all systems went down, and the power outage lasted nearly two months, because it had no repair crews or replacement components on hand.

Auckland's businesses lost millions of dollars. Companies tried to stay open by using generators, office workers climbed stairs in skyscrapers in mid-summer, and generator noise and diesel smoke filled downtown. At one point Auckland was provided power to essential facilities through an electric cable plugged into a large ship in the harbor.

You would think that New Zealand privatization advocates would have rethought their positions after they saw the carnage created by Mercury. But that was not the case.

They actually claimed that the problem was caused by not having privatized enough infrastructure. While ludicrous, given what they had experienced, that view is not unique.

Consider that they are agreeing to sign away their ability to protect the public interest and are setting in motion the same sort of disaster that Auckland faced, while the federal government is offering tax breaks to promote privatization.

The lesson and warning for states and local governments who are being wooed by private contractors is to do their due diligence. Read the contracts. Demand explanations and information.

Ask for evidence that the public sector cannot do what private contractors do — and at lower cost – since the public sector does not need to pay dividends to investors. Get advisors who are not beholden to the privatization industry. And use common sense.

If you had thought the miracle of infrastructure privatization sounded too good to be true, now you know it is.

You can find more details in Crumbling Infrastructure, Crumbling Democracy: Infrastructure Privatization Contracts and Their Effects on State and Local Governance.

It was first published in the Northwestern Jounral of Law and Social Policy at 6 Nw. J. L. & Soc. Pol’y 47 (2011), http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/njlsp/v6/n1/2/.

http://employmentpolicy.org/topic/23/blog/if-it-sounds-too-good-be-true-what-you-need-know-don%E2%80%99t-about-privatizing-infrastructur

Pelican >>What do you suggest? We halve the minimum wage?

Well, yes, but not half. Hear me out

You see the businesses are bearing the brunt of people 'life style' choices.

Many now have plasmas and other gadgets that they really can't afford, so, the governments answer is to increase wages, to the point where the unskilled are being paid up to $25 per hour and that's at normal time rates.

What should be happening is the government offers assistance to the 'needy', but the 'greedy' should either find a second job (without being unfairly taxed) or, do the extra hours to make up for their lack of skills.

There are billions of spare dollars out there of tax payers money to assist people, it's just that collective governments would rather either 'waste it' or give to someone in another country, most of whom can't control their breeding habits.

There is enough evidence to suggest that simply increasing wages because times are tough results in businesses finding an alternative in the likes of China.

End result. We loose!

i know thinking is difficult for you clubber
so i will keep it simple

increasing money to the poor
only makes the slum landlords increase the rent
so you want to help the poor cancel rent asistance[the capitalists feeding off them will then need to either drop the rent[or sell off their slums]

furthjer your suggestion to half wages is not only insane.,.but will ebnsure that small/medium business goes bust all the faster

see by halving the money [or rather credit] they have to spend
they ...more than need to halve their spending

no big plasma power consuming tv's
to chew up the power bills

no latest style jeans
or buzzbox vidio phone or computa
nor watch a movie
or get a cup of coffee
or buy some bakers treat
or a drink at the local boozer

they then also need to default
on their intrest only credit card repayments

and join the credit poor on the floor
and get out of their appartments and go visit the slum lord