another articleAustralia 'racist' says former Telstra boss
26/05/2009 9:00:00 AM
By Stuart Fagg, ninemsn Money
Australia is "racist" and "backward", according to former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo, who is now in the US after leaving the telco earlier this month.
Mr Trujillo, who was dubbed one of the 'three amigos' along with fellow US Telstra executives Phil Burgess and Greg Winn, told the BBC that he had experienced racism during his four years as Telstra CEO.
"I think by definition [it was racism] - there were even columnists who wrote stories that said it was," Mr Trujillo said.
"But my point is that [racism] does exist and it's got to change because the world is full of a lot of people and most economies have to take advantage - including Australia - of a diverse set of people."
As CEO of Telstra he earned more than $30 million, despite the telco's share price losing nearly 40 percent of its value during his watch.
Mr Tujillo added that Australia's immigration policies are out of step with the modern world and that coming to Australia is like "stepping back in time".
"Just simply because some of the policies, some of the laws, or more recent, when you think of immigration policies that weren't changed until 30 years ago or so, which were very restrictive," the ABC reported him as saying.
He also claimed that Australians had apologised to him personally for the reception he was given. "Many Australians have come up to me and they've apologised, because they're embarrassed by that kind of behaviour," Mr Trujillo said.
Mr Trujillo cut a controversial figure during his time at Telstra, frequently clashing with both the Howard and Rudd Governments culminating with the telco being locked out of the government's National Broadband Network.
Speaking earlier this month, Mr Trujillo said he doubted whether the network would ever be built.
"I haven't (commented on the proposal) and I won't," Mr Trujillo said.
"I'll comment in four or five years. Let's see if it ever happens. We'll draw a conclusion if it happens."
He left Telstra last week, one month earlier than planned and is already making waves in the US where shareholders in the retail giant Target are being urged to vote him off the company's board of directors.
You know there is racism in Australia. However using a reference to a Chevy Chase movie and because Kevin Rudd used the term "adios" isn't a good example.Sol's short memory of Singapore slur
Michael West
May 27, 2009
SOL TRUJILLO'S claims on the BBC that Australia is a racist country sit oddly with the dog-whistle politics which Telstra played so hard and so often under his three-year stewardship.
"We are an Australian company, majority owned by Australians. We are not from Singapore or anywhere else," Mr Trujillo's chairman, Donald McGauchie, told shareholders at the company's AGM a year ago.
The Singapore reference was a shot at Telstra's main competitor, Optus, which is owned by Singapore Telecommunications.
One brochure sent to shareholders before the 2007 federal election featured a picture of a "swamp-dwelling bloodsucker" which read: "Like leeches, foreign companies are encouraged by lopsided regulations to act like parasites on Telstra's infrastructure, milking the investments of Telstra's 1.6 million shareholders."
As the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, rejected the remarks amid a flurry of political and community response, it was almost forgotten that Telstra's strategy under Trujillo was the battle with the Government and its competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, over access by Optus and others to Telstra networks.
Shortly after joining Telstra in 2005, Trujillo brought in a group of Americans. They were dubbed the Three Amigos, a jocular reference to the madcap Chevy Chase road trip movie rather than a racial taunt. It stuck, and irked the hard-selling executive who, as an enthusiastic supporter of George Bush, could have been expected to have had a better sense of humour.
Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the son of Mexican immigrants, Trujillo was not fluent in Spanish. Nor is Rudd, who managed an adios for the man who took Telstra nowhere for a price tag of more than $35 million.
And just for kicks, corrected for truth
Ah, the irony."Like leeches, foreign CEOs are encouraged by free market idealogy to act like parasites on Telstra's infrastructure, milking the investments of Telstra's 1.6 million shareholders."
