I’ve read so much about the Telstra break-up this week, and written and spoken about it so much, that my brain’s still fizzing. But here’s one thing: I predicted this more than a year ago!

On 2 January 2008 I wrote, as part of my Predictions for 2008:

Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.

OK, I got the timing wrong. But it does seem that I was reading the signs correctly.

Looking back at those predictions, I’m saddened to see that former defence minister Brendan Nelson hasn’t been investigated for his role in that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft — even if someone has since pointed me to their potential use in an electronic warfare role — but has instead been made ambassador to the EC, NATO, Belgium and Luxembourg, and special representative to the World Health Organisation.

Not quite the outcome I was after, unless some Eurospook’s going to give the good Dr Nelson a thorough probing in Brussels.

If that happens, I don’t want pictures.

So, I’m updating my 2008 predictions score to 56.25%, which is now a pass instead of a fail. That’s fair, right?

[Photo: Former Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, courtesy Wikipedia. I'm so thoroughly confused by the implications of the licensing on that image and a recent Creative Commons report on how people define "non-commercial" that I'll just say this post is licensed by whatever Creative Commons license it needs to be to shut everyone up. FFS write in Plain English, people!]

Bonus links: This week’s writing about Telstra

• Telstra has to morph into a different kind of beast
• Great for competition? Or one true NBN?
• Crikey Clarifier: What caused Sydney CBD’s Telstra outage?

Crikey‘s Bernard Keane has written a magnificent 2000-word wrap of the year in Australian politics, 2008: Dashed dreams and mouldy political compromise. Every sentence is worth reading — but especially his observations about the links between politicians and the media.

Politics is more or less based around people of high principles and good will discovering that the obtaining and exercising of power involves doing bad things, distasteful things, amoral things, involves unpleasant trade-offs and not just the famous half-loaves of compromise but stale, mouldy crusts. And it’s all the more that way because its symbiotic partner, its Siamese twin the media, dislikes complexity and nuance, in favour of the same simple narratives, repeated with an ever-changing cast of characters but the same plots and moral lessons over and over again. That’s what sells. And what gets votes.

It’s the media’s job, or one of them, to make much of little and it has done that expertly for much of the year, as it does always. History suggests that, barring incompetence on an inordinate scale, Labor will be in power for several terms, but that’s not going to attract many eyeballs. Instead, the most minor political events are forensically analysed, with each tiny feature placed under the microscope so that it looms large to the viewer despite its irrelevance. Recall The Australian’s concerted push for Peter Costello mid-year, undoubtedly motivated not just by a sense of mischief-making but by the moderate inclinations of the obvious alternative to the failing Nelson. After more than a year on the backbench, not a scintilla of evidence has emerged that Peter Costello ever intended to do anything other than what he said, which was to remain on the backbench until he found a job outside politics. And yet we — as in all of us — devoted many pixels and column inches to his imminent ascension, or the unlikelihood thereof.

Afterwards, we forgot all about that, and probably hoped our readers did too.

Never forget the media has a vested interested in convincing you something is happening even when precisely nothing is happening — indeed, particularly when nothing is happening. It is thus wise – and I’m possibly not telling you anything you don’t already know here — to retain a strong scepticism about all political reportage and analysis, no matter the source. We’re all selling something.

OK, I’m biased. I write for Crikey every now and then. But this is why I’d buy it anyway.

Back in January I made some Predictions for 2008. Since 2008 has already ended, let’s see how I went.

I made eight predictions…

1. The Joy of Chairman Rudd’s Iced VoVo Revolution will be dulled by the end of January when they take some stupid actions which demonstrate that they are, after all, politicians like all others. Actually, this has already happened with the announcement of mandatory Internet filtering by ISPs. I’ll write more about that soon.

ALMOST-RIGHT. I’ll count half a point here. It took longer than January for the post-election glow to fade. I’d put it around March, when disappointment with the spin-doctoring of the Australia 2020 Summit started. However I was right in suggesting that Internet filtering would be a problem and I ended up writing a lot about that.

2. At least one member of the (former) Howard cabinet will be charged with a criminal offence over something they did in office. I’d like it to be Brendan Nelson, because that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft stinks — mostly because the air force doesn’t want them and the process was, erm, rushed to say the least. However I suspect it might be something to do with the AWB scandal.

WRONG. It seems the NSW state government is the one which is imploding.

3. Channel 7 will continue to win the Australian TV ratings. Channel 9 will fail to reinvent itself now that its owned by an investment vehicle and not a media proprietor.

RIGHT. Channel 7′s ratings victory has been decisive, and Channel 9′s program schedule is filling up with cheap game shows.

4. Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.

WRONG. The battle still quietly rages over Telstra’s structural separation, and the organisation is increasingly irrational. I was right about the continuing nasty plays by Telstra, wrong about the separation happening this year — but only because the Rudd government has been appallingly slow to take action about anything.

5. Barack Obama will win the US Presidential election. I know Hillary Clinton is currently the favourite, but I have the gut feeling that the Oprah factor will be important, and that Hillary’s dirty washing will be aired.

RIGHT. I don’t think it was “the Oprah factor” so much as the desperate need for change in America — what we Australians would call the “It’s Time” factor. I’m still rather astounded I picked it, though.

6. When former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returns from self-imposed exile on 14 February the new government, which is a coalition led by a Thaksin-supporting party, will somehow drop the corruption charges against him. Another military coup will follow.

WRONG. Thaksin did return to Bangkok and was promptly arrested and released on bail. Then, when he was given his passport back to visit Beijing for the Olympic Games, he did a runner. But he was found guilty of corruption in absentia and has said he will not appeal the two-year prison sentence. He’s currently in Dubai and will announce his plans on 14 December.

7. At least one Australian company will suffer a major leak of its customers’ private data, prompting new laws on dealing with such things (like they already have in California).

WRONG. I still think this is a problem waiting to explode.

8. We’ll finally figure out what the Storm Botnet, the world’s largest network of hacked computers, is for. My guess: whatever the hell the designer’s paying clients want it to be for.

RIGHT. The Storm Botnet was rented out mostly to spammers, and some estimates reckon 20% of the entire global spam output originated there. Researchers hijacked part of the network and reckon spammers could turn a profit with a response rate of less than one in a million.

Final Score: 43.75%. Fail.

I’ll make my predictions for 2009 closer to the New Year.

Defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon has announced that the controversial purchase of 24 Super Hornet aircraft will go ahead.

The review of the Howard government’s decision to buy the aircraft — at a total cost of $6 billion even though the RAAF hadn’t wanted them — reached some damaging conclusions, including:

• There has been a lack of sound, long-term air combat capability planning decisions by the former Government over the course of the last decade.
• The retirement of the F-111 was made in haste but is not irreversible. The cost of turning the F-111 back on would be enormous and crews and skills have already moved on.
• The former Government’s decision to leave Australia’s air defences in the hands of the Joint Strike Fighter project was a flawed leap of faith in scheduling terms and combined with the quick decision to retire the F-111 early, allowed an air combat capability gap to emerge.
• The subsequent timetable the former Government put on the acquisition of an interim fighter left Defence planners with no choice but to recommend the Super Hornet. No other suitable aircraft could be produced to meet the 2010 deadline the former Government had set. One year on, that is now even more so the case.

Cancelling the order would still incur a financial penalty and create “undesirable tensions”, and the final conclusions is that “the Super Hornet is an excellent aircraft… and is the only aircraft which can meet the small delivery window created by the former Government’s poor planning processes and politically-driven responses.”

As a shareholder in Australia Inc, I’d like to know why the former “board members” allowed this to happen. When company directors are negligent they become personally liable so why, given the report’s damning conclusions, does Brendan Nelson not become personally liable?

Why were established evaluation and purchasing processes ignored? What is the connection between former defence minister Brendan Nelson (a member of the Liberal Party), and the then chairman of Boeing Australia, Andrew Peacock, a former leader of the Liberal Party?

Hat-tip to Tim Dunlop, who also notes:

[D]o you make procurement decisions on the basis of strategy or is it on occasion necessary to build strategy around procurements that have already been made? I mean, the White Paper may be still six months away but it is hardly as if it is being written from scratch. It looks like Fitzgibbon has decided that getting the Super Hornet decision locked away was the more important factor and is happy enough to make strategy decisions with the Super Hornets in the mix. To paraphrase another Defence Minister/Secretary, sometimes you do strategy on the basis on the equipment you have.

As in this case. We’re buying the Super Hornets because, essentially, it’s the only choice left.

[Photo: A US Navy (USN) F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft, Strike Fighter Squadron 115 (VFA-115), Naval Air Station (NAS) Lemoore, California (CA), launches from catapult three during flight operations on board the USN Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. US Navy via Wikipedia.]

The real fun now is seeing who’s actually ready for the future, and who just wants to stifle discussion.

Human rights lobbyist Howard Glenn puts it well, and shows that he’s ready:

Why am I enthusiastic about a relatively small two-day conference in April? Because it is a big gesture which says clearly that we have permission to start thinking about the future again. The flow-on effects are already starting. Schools want to have their own future summits, difficult long term issues are emerging for community debate. And that’s before it’s all really started.

It’s only two days and 1,000 people. Who gets to go is not as important as the fact that it is occurring at all, and that there’s such media attention to the attendance. Some will see it as a revival of the mythical Keating elites; the start of European-style social planning; a talk fest. I see it as the start of a restoration of confidence in Australian culture, identity and ingenuity, and a faith that we can think about future challenges, and find what we need to face them.

So what about everyone else?

Looking through recent news stories…

• Opposition leader Brendan “Mr 9%” Nelson reckons the summit will be a dog’s breakfast. Looking at the state of his own party, I guess he’d know a dog’s breakfast when he sees it.
• His deputy Julie Bishop branded it an “elite” event — yes, she’s imaginatively dragging out that Howard-era term of denigration, which apparently is not negative when applied to “elite athletes”. Somehow she knew this before she’d even seen the steering committee, let alone the full list of attendees. “Elitism is dead,” says the deputy leader of the party full of lawyers and private school attendees. Yes, that’s certainly reflected in the polls, luv! Keep up this mindless negativity and your stay in opposition will be a long one.
• All sorts of people with a “special interest” whinge that their own specific focus isn’t mentioned by name somewhere: Gisela Kaplan on the environment; Duncan Riley on tech; Yvonne Zeniou on the parents of disabled children. Folks, a “vision for the future” is not just a list of jigsaw pieces.
• Disappointingly, steering committee member Tim Costello focuses on the problem of teenage binge drinking which, while perhaps a problem that needs addressing, is hardly “a vision thing”. Let’s hope the “strengthening families and communities” topic doesn’t become a shopping-list for wowsers craving a return to some mythical golden past of endless backyard cricket.

People are wanting to talk about the future. Grass-roots websites have sprung up at Summit2020.org and CounterSummit Australia2020 and OzIdeas and BangTheTable and I’m sure there’ll be plenty more.

Is it only the federal opposition that’s afraid of the conversation?

I’ll get the obvious comments out of the way first. Kevin Rudd delivered the Apology with dignity and grace. Brendan Nelson’s speech was moving in parts, but fortunately his attempts to weasel it failed to sour the overall occasion. I agree with Paul Keating’s comment that Nelson missed the point of the day.

I was disgusted to hear that Chris Pearce, the Member for Aston, was reading a magazine and cracking jokes during Rudd’s speech.

As Chris Graham, editor of The National Indigenous Times reports in Crikey:

At the part where Rudd was talking about the tragedy of infant mortality,­ the “little ones” in Rudd’s words,­ Pearce was cracking a joke to the rather uncomfortable looking member of parliament sitting next to him.

In fact, Pearce was so against an apology, that he also sat and read through his own leader’s entire speech. When Rudd finished and received a standing ovation, Pearce was the only member of parliament to remain seated. It begs the question, why did he even show up?

Who voted this ignorant yobbo into Parliament? Mr Pearce, you’re entitled to hold an opinion, but at least show some manners in the House. You could hardly accuse Wilson Tuckey of being Australia’s best-mannered parliamentarian, but at least when he decided against the Apology he didn’t turn up.

The negative radio talkback callers were the people we always hear on these occasions: the whining, selfish, ignorant, bitter white-trash who seem incapable of seeing the world through anyone else’s eyes.

HEART FM Hobart 09:44 AM: Caller Ron says white man and the Aboriginal men will never assimilate, like in the north of America. As the white man made the farming lands Ron is looking at now. Ron says an Aboriginal burned an Australian flag that soldiers fought under…

2UE Sydney 09:37 AM: Caller Helen doesn’t agree with the apology to the Stolen Generations because Governments shouldn’t apologise every time there is a bad law. Says she has Aboriginal friends but says there are Aboriginal people out there that, no matter what you do for them, are never happy.

When I worked for ABC Radio I produced some 4000 hours of talk and talkback programs, and I heard far, far too many of these people complaining about the riches and luxuries supposedly showered on the blacks, dole-bludgers, single mothers, poofters, arts students, immigrants and anyone else who didn’t precisely match their own experience. They, of course, had always suffered through the depression, or the War, drought, floods, bushfires, poor health, hard work and high interest rates and were deserving of their handouts.

There probably weren’t ever that many of these folks. They just seemed to have so much spare time in which to phone talkback programs — probably because they’d driven away all their friends through constant whingeing.

Thankfully, it won’t be long before they’re all dead. It’s just a shame that certain legal impediments prevent us from hurrying things up a bit.

But I digress…

Chairman Rudd has set himself an interesting challenge with talk of a bi-partisan “war cabinet” and a referendum. Once the emotion of today’s grand symbolic gesture fades, how will all unfold, I wonder?

A grass-roots call rippled through Facebook for people to change their status message to “…is sorry”. Of the 65 of my friends who’d updated their status recently enough to count, 60% of them had done so — roughly two-thirds of them with the simple “…is sorry”, the rest with additional comments. Another 8% changed their status to some acknowledgement of the day.

By any measure, today was a major milestone in Australia’s history.

1. The Joy of Chairman Rudd’s Iced VoVo Revolution will be dulled by the end of January when they take some stupid actions which demonstrate that they are, after all, politicians like all others. Actually, this has already happened with the announcement of mandatory Internet filtering by ISPs. I’ll write more about that soon.
2. At least one member of the (former) Howard cabinet will be charged with a criminal offence over something they did in office. I’d like it to be Brendan Nelson, because that deal to buy $6 billion worth of Super Hornet fighter aircraft stinks — mostly because the air force doesn’t want them and the process was, erm, rushed to say the least. However I suspect it might be something to do with the AWB scandal.
3. Channel 7 will continue to win the Australian TV ratings. Channel 9 will fail to reinvent itself now that its owned by an investment vehicle and not a media proprietor.
4. Telstra will be forced to separate its wholesale and retail businesses. Meanwhile the Sol Trujillo-led management team will continue to play nasty with the government, causing them to be increasingly sidelined — especially over the Rudd government’s new broadband rollout.
5. Barack Obama will win the US Presidential election. I know Hillary Clinton is currently the favourite, but I have the gut feeling that the Oprah factor will be important, and that Hillary’s dirty washing will be aired.
6. When former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returns from self-imposed exile on 14 February the new government, which is a coalition led by a Thaksin-supporting party, will somehow drop the corruption charges against him. Another military coup will follow.
7. At least one Australian company will suffer a major leak of its customers’ private data, prompting new laws on dealing with such things (like they already have in California).
8. We’ll finally figure out what the Storm Botnet, the world’s largest network of hacked computers, is for. My guess: whatever the hell the designer’s paying clients want it to be for.

You might also like to read the interesting predictions from The Australian (not really predictions, but obvious events following on from their news calendar), advertising agency JWT, Peter Black and Rachel Polanskis, and predictions about toy names for 2008.

What are your predictions for 2008? And how do you think mine rate?

You might have thought the Prime Minister could have made the effort to be there for his adversary of 27 years standing, but he did not. John Howard remains a miserable toad. The rest of the Howard ministry took their cue and also absented themselves — Robb and Nelson the exceptions. And know also that when Beazley finished speaking and sat down, and those in the public gallery got to their feet to join the applause of Beazley’s Labor colleagues and most of us in the press gallery, Andrew Robb and three of the Liberal backbenchers applauded, too.

Brendan Nelson did not.

I always liked Kim Beazley — which, you should note, is not the same thing as saying he’d make a good Prime Minister. He was a strategic thinker and a good orator, both skills lacking in modern politics.

I meant to say it at the time: the articles by Alan Ramsey (which I just quoted) and Annabel Crabb are well worth reading — if for nothing else than the historical snippets Beazley dropped.