No-one seems chastised in the slightest by the comprehensive shambles of Australian government pay television policy over the past decade.
Every other developed country has virtual saturation pay TV coverage. Australia’s pay TV is piecemeal except in some affluent pockets of capital cities where there are two services.
The appalling policy has resulted in huge losses to Optus and Telstra that one way or another will be paid for by the Australian community. Last week Telstra wrote down $800 million in pay TV losses and Optus wrote down $400 million. It brought Australia’s accumulated pay TV losses to $3 billion. Never mind, the losses can be off-set by milking the Australian public through higher-than-necessary telephone charges.
Nearly all of the losses can be put down to bad government policy. Bad mogul-specific media policy, to be precise.
Labor was so intent on the ideology of competition and letting the two big boys (Murdoch via Telstra and Packer via Optus) get the lion’s share of the action that it set up the worse possible model for pay TV. It allowed single entities to be both providers of content and providers of infrastructure. So we had competition in the provision of infrastructure — that is the roll out of two sets of cable in what was hoped to be lucrative areas and no roll out in the bush. It was stupid duplication. And it was obvious to the meanest intelligence, despite the pathetic protestations of Telstra’s Frank Blount last week. (Even some commentators in The Canberra Times predicted it.)
The model also prevent vigorous competition among an array of content providers because they were shut out by the big two. Instead of competition we have two vertical monopolies for pay TV.
We should have had a single owner for the infrastructure (a regulated monopoly), either privately or publicly owned or mixed. And we should have had an array of content providers competing on that single network of cable and satellite. It would have been profitable on its own.
The attempt to piggy-back telephone services on pay TV cable would have been dismissed as technological and marketing nonsense, which it always was. And the Australian public would not have been saddled with the huge losses which will sound for decades in higher phone costs and a lower privatisation benefit from the Telstra float.
Can someone say sorry? Can someone say we will learn a lesson for future media policy. I doubt it.