Coonan has to learn a little bit more about poker strategies if she's going to trouble Telstra. What she has to do is threaten to build a national network, that provides FTTN in the cities, and makes it available to all comers. And she has to be prepared to actually follow through, if Telstra calls the bluff. That might require her to start the planning process, because Telstra's playing a high-stakes game of brinkmanship. They want the Government to ease the regulations, so they can use this new network to continue to screw their broadband competitors and the Australian public, which in any country other than Australia, would be regarded as a scandal, but which Telstra and this government believes is their birthright.

Coonan still doesn't seem to realise that if she's going to serve the needs of Australian business - let alone the needs of consumers - she's got to break the Telstra network stranglehold. Here's the situation that the unholy Telstra/Government partnership has produced: an American company can get a T1 broadband - real broadband - service for $700 a month, with unlimited traffic. Here, Telstra hits local companies with volume-based charges that are - let's make no bones about this - crippling them financially, and making them internationally uncompetitive.

This is a situation, Senator Coonan, that your predecessors should have done something about 10 years ago, and it's unfair that the hand they've given you to play is such a poor one. But the Government's got all that money that we've been paying them to do things like build infrastructure, so rather than constantly hiding it away and then using it to get themselves re-elected [what a cute bunch of cynics they are], all they have to do is spend it on a truly worthwhile, indeed critical piece of infrastructure. And to do that, Senator, you've got to get John Howard and Peter Costello into the game. And bluff them. Are you up to it? Somehow we doubt it.