From
http://www.crikey.com.au/Business/20080508-Telstras-Dr-Phil-wins-media.html

When Telstra and Phil Burgess were ripping into Graeme Samuel and the Howard
Government last year, News Ltd’s Terry McCrann was one of many critics who
lined up to give him a whack.

But the big talking American really turned things around in a speech last
week, generating this gushing praise from the normally hard-to-impress
McCrann.

Burgess is literally Australia’s busiest business executive on the
Australian talk circuit and he graced the MEAA public affairs conference in
Sydney yesterday afternoon, turning in another virtuoso performance.

There were plenty of gags. Brendan Nelson was "what’s his face, the guy with
the funny hair" and his Canberra bashing was rationalised on the ground that
"the reason you kick pollies around is so you can be nice to dogs".

While Burgess is first and foremost a Telstra spruiker who wants to maximise
the power of its monopoly, his insights into Australian political, business
and media life are getting better with time.

When the promoters of the new Australian Institute for Public Policy fronted
Phil for some support, he laughed them out of his office on the basis that
no think tank can possibly be independent when the Victorian and Federal
Labor governments are contributing $30 million and will have multiple seats
on the board.

And rather than opportunistically going with the media flow now that
relations with the new Rudd Labor Government seem ok, Burgess slammed our
industry to the spinners yesterday.

"The Australian media is very subservient to government. It was subservient
to the last government and after five months it is subservient to this
government."

How true it is.

The Rudd Government has an important decision coming up when Graeme Samuel’s
first term at the ACCC expires and the Telstra situation will be a major
factor.

After slamming the previous government for giving the flawed Opel consortium
a $1 billion hand out, I asked Phil if he now agreed this decision was
driven entirely by government spite.

"My own gut instinct is that they did it out of spite," he said. "If they
did that, shame on them... it is unbelievable."

Burgess revealed that there were three attempts to fix the government
relationship before the Opel decision but they were torpedoed each time with
Peter Costello and his great mate Samuel driving this strategy.

The 7.30 Report’s Greg Hoy reported last June that Telstra went too far when
Burgess said the following: "When Labor talks about broadband, they talk
about jobs, growth, economic development, urban-rural parity, export,
productivity growth, all the things that are important. When the regulator
talks about broadband, they talk about regulations."

Peter Costello responded with the following: "I don't think I've ever seen a
company in Australia engage in the kind of attacks that Telstra is currently
engaging in upon an independent statutory regulator. And this attack, and
it's quite a personal attack, is absolutely unprecedented."

Costello promptly gave the Singapore Government $1 billion to build the
sub-standard WiMAX network in the bush. The Rudd Government has since
cancelled the Opel contract and Graeme Samuel must be feeling pretty nervous
about his prospects.