Former Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo has called Australia racist and claimed that the local economy had only become "developed" in the last decade.
Speaking to the BBC, Trujillo said about racism: "My point is that that 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. And if there is a belief that only a certain people are acceptable versus others, that is a sad state."
The full BBC interview does not appear to be available online, but several excerpts from it can be found here.
Trujillo pointed to events not cited over the past decade from his own personal experience with racism: "I think it was evidenced in a lot of ways there with me personally, but more importantly with others."
But one event that Trujillo did expand upon was Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's "Adios" response to the news that Trujillo was leaving Telstra. "Many Australians have come up to me and they've apologized, because they're embarrassed by that kind of behavior," he said.
The former Telstra chief also said that the local business environment was different to that of the United States. "In many ways it's like stepping back in time, just simply because of some of the policies, some of the laws that are more recent," he said.
"If you think about privatization of companies--you know that's only 10 or 15 years old, in terms of what most people would call a developed economy."
He was unrepentant on the issue of CEO pay. "There are always people that will criticize compensation, but these are big jobs with big responsibilities, and somebody needs to do it but they need to be [incentivized] to do it otherwise you'll get very mediocre-like people and then you'll get government-like behavior," he said.
Throughout the interview, Trujillo repeated his belief that innovation occurs in areas free of government intervention. "The Internet's not regulated, innovation occurs. Wireless isn't regulated, innovation occurs. Fixed line is regulated, and it's now 100 years old and still moving at a snail's pace."
Last week Trujillo claimed that the National Broadband Network was a fantasy.
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Trujillo: Australia is racist, anachronistic
Poor old Sol. He turned Australias biggest Telco into one thats superfluous. The companies share price is less than half it was, the company didn't even bid for the countries biggest broadband rollout EVER, will lose the copper network monopoly, customer service is a joke, the shareholders hate him. He just wanted to sue everyone, as is the American way. The first thing everyone in Australians expected of Sol, is for him to shout his own praises. Did Sol change anything in Australia, on the contrary. He sent the Nations biggest and most successful telco to the toilet. He couldn't run a chook raffle
Posted by Pete McLean on Tuesday, May 26 2009 12:32 PM