Business opinion on LLU
June 27th, 2006 at 8:33 am by David FarrarThe Dom Post has a poll of Wellington businesses every two months. Being a poll of business owners they tend to support good centre-right policies such as lower taxation, reform the RMA etc.
How-ever one thing Labour has done they massively approve of. The Government’s decisions on local loop unbundling are supported by 86% of business with only 7% against. That is huge, and demonstrates how welcome the package is.
Now of course mere popularity alone is not a good reason to do something, but it does say something when you have such over-whelming support from the sector which is usually most oppossed to regulation.
Incidentially the Government introduce the Telecommunications Amendment Bill yesterday, which the Herald reports on here. I’ve not yet had time to do more than a quick read of it.
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June 27th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Trains running on time can be popular too.
Vote:June 27th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Its just another example of the “Whoever robs Peter to pay Paul, will always have the support of Paul” aspect of human nature.
Vote:June 27th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
I take it DPF you would be one of the Magnificent 7%?
Vote:Even if the policy is good, don’t cross party lines! Eh?
June 27th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
David,
Businessmen of all scales were great supporters of F.D.R.’s fascist ‘New Deal’ policies. They supported an incredible degree of regulation because they thought they’d profit by it.
They were wrong, of course, but it took them years to realise it, and many never did.
Vote:June 27th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Or that all the Peters are fed up with Paul ripping them off.
Vote:June 27th, 2006 at 8:04 pm
Although I agree that Telecom has abused its monopoly position and as such had partially surrendered its property rights in this matter, it is absolutely no surprise that businesses are all in favour of actions that will directly favour them at someone elses expense. There’s no end the generosity you can aspire to giving away someone elses money.
Vote:June 28th, 2006 at 8:00 am
How would those businesses like it if they had spent 16 years and billions of dollars rolling out new infrastructure to have the government come along and allow johnny-come-latelys to their sector, who have invested virtually nothing in infrastructure, to set up marketing operations piggy backing on and profiteering off of their 16 year programme of investment?
How would that encourage them to invest any further?
Vote:June 29th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Battler, if they don’t invest any further they will go down the gurgler. Good isn’t it? They have to invest instead of bloat-and-gouge.
As a parallel question, how would you like it if your business was in something that the government had handed to a competitor on a platter years ago, in which they had complete market dominance? And any time you introduced a competing service they simply waged a short, sharp price war against you in your targetted areas, propped up by profits from other areas you had not yet reached, until you were bankrupted, before jacking prices back up in those areas.
As a network engineer for many years in the early part of this century, I observed this exact pattern of behaviour over and over. At first I was happily able to advise my customers that they had a competing service. Then I was happily able to advise them that Telecom offered an even better service. Then I had to advise them that the competition had gone bankrupt and Telecom’s prices were as they were before this happy but brief period of competition ended. Then I had to charge them for hours on end spent listening to Telecom hold-music while I tried to get their problems resolved that had suddenly become low priority. I experienced first-hand what a pain it is to even get Telecom to admit there is a problem, let alone fix it. In the end I was pretty much forced to recommend XTRA as their ISP, since dealing through other ISPs was more costly in the time wasted proving to Telecom that the problem was indeed at their end.
It is no wonder I have washed my hands of such tedious and frustrating work. Indeed, even as somebody supplying a ‘supporting service’ I was driven out of the market by Telecom’s ability to provide quality-of-service contracts at premiums slightly below what I could break even on, since it cost them almost nothing to fix problems that involved hours of my time (waiting for Telecom). That is not exactly true – my customers remained loyal, if only to spare themselves the mental frustration of having any dealings with Telecom, but I got sick of it and moved to business that was not dominated by such a vitality draining sponge.
Vote: