ausculture.com

Richard Branson, the entrepreneur with the Midas touch, was once asked how he decided what sector the Virgin brand should take on in a new country. That’s easy, he said, we just look at the names on the tallest buildings – they’re the companies making the biggest profits.

No surprise, then, that the Melbourne skyline is dotted with the logos that make us see red.

Commonwealth Bank

The yellow diamond with the cancerous black wedge in the corner represents the Commonwealth Bank (or the Collectingwealth Bank, according to one eye-catching satirical bumper sticker, with the tag line “A guaranteed fee with every transaction”!) If you open one of their Streamline current accounts, you’re likely to be stung with a $4 fee every month – or $6 if you want the luxury of speaking to a real person on the phone without incurring a separate charge. But those generous folks at ConBank, er, I mean CommBank will waive that fee if you have $50,000 or more in their accounts. If you have less than that with them, do not fear, you’ll at least earn a massive 0.01% interest on the account balance! (At that rate, it would take a balance of $480,000 to recoup the year’s bank fees!)

The Commonwealth raked in a bumper $4.4 billion profit last year, up 14% on the previous year. They own Colonial First State, making them Melbourne CBD’s biggest landlord[1].

ANZ, NAB & Westpac

NAB does make a $4 a month charge for its eBanking account, but at least includes phone assistance, debit card transactions, etc. ANZ and Westpac both offer internet banking accounts with no monthly fee, the Westpac eSaver offering a generous 5.25% (or above) on balances from $5,000. It therefore wins the prestigious Ausculture Award for Rortless eBanking, 2008! (The award is a rare green and yellow striped paperclip – I’m sure they’ll be stoked!)

Profits for ANZ last year of $4 bn (up by 6%) were considered disappointing. NAB, however recorded a record $4.2 bn, up over 17%. And the last of the four big banks, the award-winning Westpac (which escaped the above ‘identity parade’) made $3.4 bn (up 12%), perhaps demonstrating that doing the right thing needn’t impact on profitability.

Telstra

It’s hard to know where to start on the litany of Telstra travesties. The Chaser found it was cheaper to call a random person in the US for the number of a business here than to use Telstra’s Directory Assistance! Their voice ‘recognition’ systems continue to drive customers up the wall. Mobile GPRS data charges, and now those for Next G data, defy belief.

‘Telstra.com’, it says in giant, illuminated letters atop their head office, emblazoned as if to advertise what a wonderful ambassador they are for the internet revolution. Far from it. Sign up for a standard home broadband plan and you’re in for some nasty surprises. On their $29.95 a month plan, you get a 200 MB data allowance per month. Their own literature notes that Windows security updates from Microsoft can be over 150 MB, but they have a simple solution – just “...turn this feature off”! (Good job this isn’t America, or hacked and hacked off users might be lining up to sue Telstra over that one!) ADSL plans range from $29.95 to $159.95 per month, but with each you get just one inclusive mailbox, limited to 20 MB.

Telstra’s profit last year was a ‘low’ $3.3 billion (up by around 5%), although this didn’t stop CEO Sol Trujillo getting a 30% pay rise to nearly $12m per year. Life on the bottom rung isn’t so rosy, as can be gleaned from a comment by Telstra Chief Operations Officer Greg Winn last year:

“We run an absolute dictatorship and that’s what’s going to drive this transformation and deliver results… If you can’t get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice… then you just shoot ’em and get them out of the way…”

The Big Rort

Greg Winn’s telling comment reveals a ‘psychotic’ culture shared by many corporate giants – there is only one thing that matters, and that’s the bottom line. The customer doesn’t matter; the employee is just a drain on earnings who should be either replaced by an automated system or controlled as if he or she was one; the wider social picture and the environment are entirely irrelevant.

This approach is morally reprehensible and ultimately counter-productive for the company.

The more enlightened big business will talk about the triple bottom line: financial success, social responsibility and environmental sustainability. The customer should want to trade with it because s/he’s impressed by what it stands for. The employee should want to work for it because s/he feels valued (is valued). Society at large should embrace its philosophy because it’s helping society move forward. And the environment should be a little less impacted by it every passing year.

So why should this utopian vision actually become a reality? Because of you. We vote with our wallets all the time; all we need do is shun the morally dysfunctional companies until they change.

There’s a reason why, for instance, so many of our neighbouring countries enjoy 100 Mbps urban broadband for $30-40 a month while we barely manage 1% of that, and it’s not just political. Something in our collective psyche makes us resigned to the corporate rort.

Grounding the Bad Teen

Corporations – even multi-nationals – are like society’s kids. They will try it on; find out what the boundaries are. That’s what Network Ten did with the subliminal advertising. It’s what Microsoft did with their OS’s built-in web browser. And it’s what many of the companies making up our city skylines do all the time.

So it’s time to say ‘enough is enough’. And if you feel trying to ‘ground’ Telstra would be like a scene from Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, just remember: there are over twenty million of us...

[1] according to The Age, 18/12/04
Figures are approximate and information not authoritative