I would be wary of claims/data from state run monopolies, there's always direct and/or indirect subsidies burdening the general population - especially when they used to be combined with the Post Office as in Germany.

NewVista .
This Claim had no connection to the said Companies. It was however a independent survey which had no connection with Telecom Management either. I was working for Telecom at the time and always had my ears to the ground about these things.
I believe the survey was commissioned by the Telecommunication workers union at the time .
Australia in land mass is 300 square miles smaller than the U.S and only had one telco at the time which meant with a workforce of just under 100,000 and the distances covered was a monumental task to run efficiently. But efficiently it was run!
As a insider I would shake my head at the apparent lack of interest by both sides of politics in keeping a company that was capable of paying off the National Debt.
At that time Telecom wasnt even allowed to sell answering machines or any other useful add on device because the Government wanted it to look inefficient in the public eyes so as to make it easier to sell. Yet as soon as the privatisation process started then Telstra shops started popping up everywhere.

Governments have sold off most of their money-making enterprises for a fast buck.

Telephone companies, banks, building societies, insurance companies, totalisator agency boards, electricity retailers, lottery offices and in Victoria, even their motor registry is now in private hands. I think NSW is about to flog off the rights to mange the land titles office.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

QUOTE: independent survey

Was this a peer-reviewed paper? I'd like to read it. Do you have a source, link?

QUOTE: a workforce of just under 100,000

In the early 80s, Nine-network's '60 Minutes' did an investigative piece on 'Telecom Australia'[TA]: they outed a stunning statistic: Canadian Bell serving almost twice the population had half the employees of TA! Politicians took notice; this marked the beginning of the end for TA (and TAA )

At about this same time I knew an engineer inside TA, I had him designing electronic speaker-crossovers for me, so had to pay him a visit at work in CBD of Brisbane (seems TA occupied/rented a lot of buildings/floorspace around the city.) I went up to his floor where there were many engineers standing around wearing short pants and long white socks (this was Queensland after all ) Were they hard at work solving technical problems? No, they were standing around talking. I eavesdropped on their conversation: they were discussing the relative merits of various water treatments/filtration for their swimming pools

Those last sentences describe our hospitals and railways to a tee, with staff who are supposedly stressed out and about to start headbutting the walls because of their workload hanging around in groups of three or four, keeping patients awake and tapping away on their mobile phones instead of doing their jobs. And don't even get me started on our train drivers.

All these people are getting wage rises of between 1 and 2% in Victoria and Queensland with no strike action on the radar. They've been offered 3% in New South Wales and think it's not enough but because there is a conservative government here (one of only two left across Australia) they are engaging in rolling strike action despite already being the highest paid and driving the most modern and reliable trains.

Wage claims of up to 25% are not only patently outrageous but do not reflect the circumstances. The dollars aren't there for this largesse and it's time they all did their jobs whilst they still have one.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Hey TC,

I remember such a survey, the results were published in our union newsletter. I joined Telecom in '82 and the newsletter with the survey results was circulated between 83 and 85 from memory.

Around the same time John Howard was publically questioning what our government was doing operating an airline,(TAA) clearly privatisation of public utilities were underway.

The survey you refer to was conducted by the postal and telecommunications union but I cannot recall which one, I have a faint memory that there may have been two unions. From memory they may have operated a credit union who lent me money to purchase my first home, but I can't be sure as to what level of involvement, if any, they had in the financial side.

In those days everyone in Australia was entitled to a home telephone installation. Cost to the householder, $156. Did not matter where you lived, next door to the exchange or on top of a remote mountain. Same price for all. If you had to dig a mile long trench you did it. If you had to build a radio concentrator on top of a hill you did it. No extra cost to the subscriber. If the service failed it there would be a 'first-in' tech onsite the same day.

The union declared all this would change as private companies skimmed the cream from CBD markets and left everyone else with a sub standard service. Today if your landline fails you may see a tech the same week or you may not, depends where you live.

Anyone living in the bush today will tell you that history has vindicated that union.

QUOTE: the postal (or) telecommunications union

Were engineers like I encountered in a union? With or without, they seemed quite prosperous discussing swimming pools.

QUOTE: survey .. circulated between 83 and 85 ..

They must have been reacting to the 60 Minutes bombshell turning up the heat from the Howard government.
Also they couldn't help noting the earthquake at that time when the US govt smashed the massive AT&T monopoly.

I left Telecom in 1990 and there was, in my opinion, a surplus of engineers at the time. The union, postal AND telecommunications, certainly was feeling the winds of change.

This reminds me of a few episodes of Get Smart. In the five seasons of shows, AT&T was referred to a few times. As many will remember, telephone usage in the show was quite prominent. In the movie that featured in the years following the end of the regular shows, Max was given a new shoe phone by a Control technician and Max asked if he was able to choose his own carrier.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

New Vista
I remember the report about Canadian bell quite well. 60 minutes had perfected the art of embellishing their reporting to make Telecom Australia or any other company that maybe in competition with their shareholders look bad.
They stated that Canadian Bell charged nothing for "Local Calls" ( Telecom Australia charged 10 cents per local call) but a little fact that they chose not to include was a local call in Canada was within the city block your house or residence was on ( you could actually shout your message to your neighbour lol ) . Once the call went out of your block the STD charges kicked in whereas here in Australia a local call had a distance of 100 kilometres.
Also yes the population may have been double that of Australia but Canadian Bell did not service them all as there were many other private telcos there as well.
I became well aware of the not so correct facts put out by the government and private media firms.

QUOTE: The union...feeling the winds of change

Also feeling the winds of change was AT&T: they had a strange ad in the mid 70s (as seen in Fortune magazine) with a portrait of John Stuart Mill and quoting him philosophising "London would be better served if there was only one gas company". I thought this is blatant lobbying; it's a wonder the regulators didn't pounce on it (perhaps they did, the campaign was short lived.)

They were right to worry, the break-up was less than 10 years away!

Strangely, the mandated seven regional "Baby Bells" soon began re-aggregating, the strong buying out the weak. Where were the regulators? Perhaps exhausted by this time?

" The Winds of Change" was actually brought about by ever improving technology.
When I first started with Telecom in "1980" I was building equipment racks that took a full week to install and handled 600 calls at a time. Twelve years later I was building equipment racks that took a day to install and held six boxes that could handle 18,000 calls at a time each. This of cause meant that the work was a lot less labour intensive.
There was no reason at all to sell Telecom out but to feather a pollies back pocket.
To add insult to injury the federal government was leasing access to Telecom sites to Optus for the princely sum of $1.00 a year.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/books/politics-and-business-magazines/telecom-australia

In answer to NewVista, as I mentioned in a post a few years ago telecoms in Australia started as private enterprise but failed commercially for several reasons. Business interests pressured the then colonial governments of the day to take over and build the network. At Federation in 1901 all the previous colonial post and telegraph/telephone systems were transferred the new Federal Government. Initially the telephone network was subsidised from general revenue (taxes) but as it was developed and expanded it became self funding and then went on to become a significant source of revenue to government. By the late1960s the PMG phone network was seen largely as a cash cow by Treasury and a way of subsidising the postal operation. Then in 1975 the PMG was split into separate postal and telecommunications organisations and the main purpose of the comms network was to generate revenue along the lines of telcos in the US and other countries. Prices for services were kept high and pressure was applied to reduce costs (labour, equipment, maintenance, etc) . As others who were in Telecom/Telstra have said the availability of new improved higher capacity equipment offset other problems for some time but the crunch came when the Aussat project fell apart. In an attempt to divest itself of this white elephant the government of the day did a deal with Optus (Cable & Wireless) to take over this 'asset' and as a sweetener opened up Australian telecoms to 'completion'. There was a new line of thinking (propaganda) being pushed by vested interests that government should be "steering not rowing" and that the business of government was not business (i.e. profitable operations) but facilitating the provision of services by commercial providers. (Of course no private enterprise would be interested in taking on the unprofitable bits unless subsidised they were by the government.) Publicly owned assets were privatised (i.e. flogged off cheap) because as the 'experts' said private enterprise could always do things better and cheaper than government. (Funny that since the selling off of the electricity network and power generation the cost to consumers has gone up and reliability has gone down.)

I'm not having a dig at the way things were/are done in the USA but what 'made sense' and was 'good practice' in the US was not necessarily applicable in Australia which had nearly the same land mass but a just a fraction of the population. If you investigate the origins of AT&T (Bell Telephone Company) the aim was always to make a profit and had nothing to do with providing a service (despite the claims in their advertising). AT&T firmly believed that telecommunications should be a private monopoly without government regulation or inference plus they aggressively worked to eliminate any completion. I have copies of original documentation showing that AT&T lobbied consistently to disparage all government ownership of telecommunication services anywhere in the world but were only too happy to sell equipment made by Western Electric (AT&T subsidiary) to all comers. This is an area that I have researched and could give a lot more info but perhaps it would be too much for this post.

As for distrusting data from government owned telcos, there were annual evaluations of the provision and efficiency of telecommunications worldwide published by a number of independent economic organisations from the 1880s onwards. The Australian PMG produced audited annual reports to Parliament from 1902 to 1975 plus a range of other publications and these gave a full 'warts and all' assessment of the department's performance. Now that Telstra is privately owned, the same info is 'Commercial-in-Confidence' and not available.