Cameron Slater's an Idiot!

That’s a statement of fact, not a question btw. He recently tweeted that Telecom isn't owned by overseas companies... What a douchebag!

Telecom was sold to two United States-based telecommunications companies, Bell Atlantic and Ameritech, for NZ$4.25 billion in 1990.

It has not been re-purchased by New Zealand and has little Kiwi investment, meaning most of the profits go off shore.

Let's have a look at the performance of Telecom since it was privatised: Everybody would have heard of Telecoms overcharging and false advertising scams, but what people might not remember is that a Kiwi Share agreement was drawn up in 1990, which included a provision that the company retained free local calling for residential customers.

But in 1999 Telecom began to charge customers who connect to the Internet using a local dial up number forcing all ISPs in New Zealand to change to a 0867 dial up number. This is in breach of the Kiwishare Agreement where residential customers were meant to have free local calling.

An audio clip recorded on 2 March 2006 was released involving Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung admitting the use of confusion as a chief marketing tool in the industry. The March recording also dismissed the New Zealand Government as "too smart to do anything dumb" with regards to regulation.

This spurred the creation of a spoof youtube clip that Telecom tried to have removed from the internet. In June 2007 Theresa Gattung stepped down with a reported golden handshake of $5.125 million in cash.

In 2004 Telecom posted a profit of NZ$916 million. The same year, Telecom won the Roger Award for The Worst Transnational Corporation operating in New Zealand.

The Auckland Chamber of Commerce publicly stated in 2007 that if Telecom do not invest in a next-generation high-speed network, comparable with that of other Western nations, they will fund a private fibre-optic based service. Four years on we still have a slow system in comparison.

This year Telecom found itself under investigation by the anti-spam unit of the Department of Internal Affairs following complaints about text messages sent to customers. The messages in question failed to feature the required 'opt-out' (unsubscribe) information.

On the 9^th of June, the DIA found Telecom to be in breach of the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007. Slater's recent blather about Labour sending some emails with the required opt out information seems rather pathetic in comparison.

Check out these quick facts to see that New Zealand does not own Telecom, the some NZ$1 billion per year the private company earns in this country from price gouging leaves New Zealand never to be seen again. I hate to think about how much New Zealand has lost since the company was privatized in the 90's. Cameron Slater is bona fide idiot for thinking otherwise.