telstra, defender of the universe

I… don’t know what the hell is going on.  Telstra, harbinger of telecommunications doom, monopolistic behemoth extraordinaire, profit driven dinosaur which ambles across the land devouring its small, innovative mammalian competitors, has made a radically pro-human rights submission to the national human rights consultative panel.

I find it very disturbing to read words put forward by Telstra which closely mirror my own views.  I wonder if I have woken up in some kind of parallel universe, or perhaps I have become a being of pure evil myself and suddenly Telstra’s views and my own coincide for that reason.  There are also odd overtones of A Christmas Carol – has the Ghost of Christmas Present touched Telstra’s cold, corporate heart by showing it the sight of Australian families weeping around their Internet bills for $12,323 in excess use charges for December?  Anyway, Telstra says, for example, that the common law alone is too ‘soft’ to support human rights and:

The more responsive but equally unsatisfactory notion of responsibility to parliaments – the slim convention of ministerial responsibility – is also no substitute for clearly articulated, enshrined, human rights protections.

The notion of ‘speaking truth to power’ usually gets applied to the courageous little guy fighting for what is right, not the hive-mind megacorporation fighting for… well, something:

The available data suggests that Australia’s human rights record does not compare overwhelmingly favourably with other countries.

There is a hint in the article linked above to Telstra’s true motivation: corporate self-interest, of course:

However, Telstra says in its submission that apart from a general concern for human rights, the company is particularly interested in values such as due process and free speech, “given the highly regulated nature of much of its business”.

In other words, Telstra realises that it is in the difficult position of being a private company which, despite privatisation, is almost entirely controlled by the political whims of the Federal Government, and it wants to have stronger positive rights to throw back at its former masters when things don’t go to suit it.  No doubt it finds the idea that every ministerial decision be subject to a raft of reviewable rights which it can then unleash its extremely high powered legal resources on is very appealing.

Realising that strong systems of due process and accountability are an effective way to achieve independence shows an unusually high degree of insight and creative thinking for such a big, slow moving organisation.  I still loathe many aspects of Telstra – case in point, the guy I saw on TV in a story about the Victorian bushfires who had just returned to his destroyed home to find nothing but his mailbox with a Telstra bill in it (one assumes that Telstra’s billing department has some manner of robotic, fire-proof suit to deliver bills in firestorms and make sure that no-one can shirk their obligations through wussy excuses like “my entire home was razed to the ground”).

But if the push for a serious set of human rights in this country gets a boost from Telstra’s considerable financial and propaganda resources that’s absolutely fine by me.  I just hope no-one mentions to it that it’s not actually human, and therefore may find it hard to take advantage of human rights…