Sol Trujillo is wrong. We're far from perfect but we're not racist. The cartoons of Trujillo under a sombrero riding a donkey are no more offensive than the treatment banks receive every day in the press. And after all, in exchange for having to put up with some unkind caricatures, Trujillo was paid a lot of money.
The reason that Trujillo was disliked by politicians (on both sides), other business leaders, unions and the media wasn't because he was an American of Hispanic background. Trujillo was disliked because he disturbed the comfortable and cozy culture that characterises much of corporate life in this country. Australia has changed a great deal but many aspects of the old government/business/union corporatist mentality remain.
Chief executives of Australian public companies are reluctant to speak out on issues for fear not just of displeasing the government, but of showing up their fellow CEOs who don't have the same courage of their convictions. This wasn't always the case, but it is now. That's why it's easy to find any number of CEOs happy to recite motherhood statements about "the need to invest more in education". And why it's next to impossible to find a CEO willing to reveal what they honestly think about the emissions trading scheme.
Trujillo was an outsider who had nothing to lose and who called it as he saw it. And what he saw astounded him.
He saw how Telstra, which supposedly had been privatised, was treated by successive coalition and Labor governments as if it were still a public utility. He saw how politicians demanded "universal service obligations" of Telstra that the politicians expected the company's shareholders to pay for. He saw how politicians had (and still have) no compunction at telling Telstra how many pay phones it must operate in rural areas or how fast its broadband speeds must be. The fact that it was taken for granted that Trujillo's replacement needed to "get along with" the federal government reveals how perverted government-business relations have become.
Trujillo saw how Telstra was expected to meekly accede to the whims of the multitude of regulators and regulatory agencies that made it their business to make life for Telstra as difficult as possible. He then saw how, whenever Telstra had the temerity to fight back against what it regarded as the confiscation of its property, the company was accused of "not playing by the rules".
Executives who have been born and bred in this country understood what Trujillo did not. Australia is not America. Here the relationship between government and business is understood, accepted and managed in a way different from the US. Ours is an economy about a twentieth the size of the US. Government is hard to avoid at the best of times, but it is especially hard to avoid in Australia.
In Australia, unlike the US, there's no tradition of shareholder activism. Trujillo was surprised at the equanimity with which Telstra shareholders accepted the regulatory depredations constantly being visited upon the company. What he didn't appreciate was that most Telstra shareholders understand it has ever been thus. If you expect to be mugged you won't be too upset when it actually happens. If you're a Telstra shareholder you know the company's share price will be affected as much by the political preferences of ministers as by the performance of your executives.
One of the more amusing comments after the announcement of Trujillo's departure was from an analyst who said that Trujillo should have made Telstra "more like Google or Apple". How Trujillo was actually going to do this wasn't explained. Trujillo could have been a combination of Bill Gates, Jack Welch and Richard Branson and the task would still have been impossible.
Trujillo should be judged against the possible, not the miraculous. Although he got some things wrong, he got some things right. For example, Telstra delivered one of the world's best wireless broadband networks. Perhaps his biggest contribution was the realisation he imposed on Telstra staff, customers and shareholders that the company had to change.
It wasn't race that brought Trujillo undone, it was that he was an outsider.
And when he bade Trujillo "adios", Kevin Rudd wasn't being racist, he was simply applying the double standard widespread in public life whereby it's acceptable to poke fun at some ethnic groups and some religions but not others. If the departing boss of Telstra had been of Arabic origin it's unlikely Rudd would have said "maasalama".
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