by god - check this out!, page-34

farmboy

Re your post which included;
"... In this case, it was that Australian icon Telstra, that copped a large amount of the money. ..."

John Howard was at war with Telstra and its 3 amigos. That's why Australia fell behind on the internet infrastructure front.

This is Wikipedia's summary about Telstra's 'privatisation':

"Telstra was privatised in three different stages, informally known as "T1" ($3.30), "T2" ($7.40) and "T3" ($3.60) in 1997, 1999 and 2006 respectively. In T1, the government sold one third of its shares in Telstra for A$14 billion and publicly listed the company on the Australian Stock Exchange. In 1999, a further 16% of Telstra shares were sold to the public, leaving the Australian government with 51% ownership. In 2006, T3 was announced by the government and was the largest of the three public releases, reducing the Government's ownership of Telstra to 17%. The 17% remainder of Telstra was placed in Australia's Future Fund, which will provide superannuation and pensions for Australia's public servants. In 2009 the Future Fund sold off another $2.4B worth of shares reducing the government's stake in Telstra to 10.9%."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstra

John Howard's government was indeed collecting dividends from its stake in Telstra and effectively sold off a golden goose. In so doing it did not create wealth or reduce net debt - it passed an essential public asset into private hands; costing T2 investors dearly.

It was left to Labor to come to terms with Telstra to rebuild Australia's antiquated, pitifully inadequate copper network. Only Malcolm Turnbull could have done a better job of this.