He reads the Australian, of course he believes it.

The fact that it's not true would not influence his thinking in any way.

You would be surprised at how few actual changes (rather than outages being returned to working condition) Telstra makes in a day. It's on the lower side of 50. I've worked at Telstra and interacted at length with change management. To actually 'change' something requires a horrifying amount of paperwork. (Compared to fixing a fault which requires one ticket outlining actions done to fix.)

Any major changes (such as implementing a new product, server, system) are all actioned in one large bundle of changes before the product goes live, and after that you're locked in and can't change anything at all without a change ticket.

It actually makes the network more stable in the long run, because it prevents cowboys from just plugging their laptop into a switch and causing a country wide outage. [Actual thing that happened once].

If you've ever worked in a company with change management, you'd know that Telstra does the first half of that anyway.

In the second half, the government would just legislate around that by insisting "All data must be provided in XYZ format, no later than XYZ days after the change has been made."

Hell, they wouldn't even need a law to do that.. They just legislate that has the authority to generate a specification that must be legally adhered to. If any telecos tried any of your hilarious suggestions, they'd find themselves in court sooner rather than later.

And they will talk to the tax office, and the tax office will say "They are in full compliance with the law. If you want them to do more you should change the law."

And that will be the end of the conversation. Unless they change the law, which they probably won't.

It might have an impact on the government, but I assure you the head of the tax office (a career civil servant) won't give a damn.

The 'tax people' don't care about when they get their money or what it is spent on as long as you are in full compliance with the laws regarding tax. Paying tax at the end of the financial year is completely legal and the 'tax people' prefer it because it reduces the amount of administrivia they have to deal with.

I can assure you, the 'tax people' won't lose any sleep over the money they 'lost'.

They should also put up their policies regarding other key issues as well. If you want to be a viable candidate to the majors, people need to know that you're not going to do crazy things with their favourite issue.

In the interests of accuracy, it wasn't abbott who knifed turnbull in the back (although I can't stand Abbott). Another MP triggered a leadership spill (Maybe Costello?) but Abbott was the third candidate and he skated in on the backs of both factions hating the 'other guy' more than they hated Abbott.

Not anymore, their mobile arm has reached the point where it's more profitable than the PSTN arm (and now that they're selling their their copper to someone else, they don't have to maintain the aging cables anymore.) I'd suggest that the cost of 'wholesaling' a copper line is going to increase, because it's going to need constant maintenance and that cost won't be subsidised by any more profitable arms of the business. (It also won't be price locked by the ACCC.)

I'm not sure if you understand how an auction works but there's no such thing as 'underbidding'. You bid what you want to pay, and if someone else wants to pay more they bid more. Your lack of auction savvy makes me wonder why you aren't condemning the other parties at the auction for purposefully inflating the price instead!