The Chaser Report - Hopefully This Episode Uploads (We're With Optus)

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Like an unreliable situationship, Optus ghosted us again. Charles and Dom chat the Optus outage and how telco companies could be improved upon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report with Dom and Dom, a big day for Optus on Wednesday in that they didn't have a big day at all. Yes, I suppose that's true. Hold on, hold on, I think we must be on the, you keep cutting out, I think you must be on the Optus Network. I'm just going to tether the different network. Yeah, just use a different network for Optus. Just hold on one sec.

I think you're actually connected via Optus 5G, which means I'm amazed I can hear you at all. I think actually the thing is that you can't really tell the difference of when Optus is down and when it's not. But I'm ching. Hold on, I really am retethering here. I mean, if only there'd been some warning, Charles, that Optus were terrible.

Hello, no. If only at some point in the past, Optus's performance had been so utterly dreadful that their customers might have been made aware that they suck. It sucked in a fairly major way. In fact, there are lots of warning signs about this, Charles, and we'll get into them after this. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most, when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

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talk to you on a Vodafone phone, right? So I'm using Vodafone for the reception. That has never happened in the history of Vodafone before. I don't know why you're still with Vodafone anyway, but Charles, not often that I'm ahead of a trend, right? It's not often that I'm days to something before anyone else. But on this occasion, I was actually in Singapore on the weekend, right? Oh yeah. And as you know, Singapore is the home of Sintel, which owns Optus. So I got off the plane, turned on my Optus phone thinking, this is cool, this will work fine. I've got the $5 a day roaming plan all set up. I'd check that it was all set up in my app.

And it did not work at all. It didn't work in any way, shape or form. I couldn't get online. I couldn't tell the guy I was staying with that I'd landed or that I'd be on my way to meet him. It was a total disaster. I couldn't transfer money. I couldn't do anything.

And eventually I got onto Optus customer service on Wi-Fi via their app, which let you message them 24-7. And after, honestly, about an hour of towing and throwing, they said, oh, yeah, it's an ongoing issue. We don't know why it's happening, and we don't know when it will be resolved. So they had absolutely nothing to say about it. So you were the canary in the coal mine? Yeah, this is four days before it stopped working for everyone else. Maybe you turning on your phone in Singapore was the straw that broke the camel's back, Dom.

It could have been. I do download a lot of data. But yes, it's kind of like a chaos here. I was the butterfly that flapped their wings at Changi Airport, taking out the entire system in Australia. But it was quite extraordinary. I don't have previously had in any tech venture, someone saying, yep, it's a big problem. We don't know what's going on. We don't know why.

And we've no idea when it will be resolved. But Charles, I understand that is basically what the CEO of Optus said. It's a technical issue. Don't know why. It just doesn't inspire confidence. Yes. Well, I mean, there was so many jokes on the day. It was just sort of, you know, the obvious ones like, oh, how can you tell the difference?

But then sort of unobvious ones, like, for example, well, another great thing was apparently our podcast on Wednesday was full of ads for Optus. And people were thinking that we were cracking some sort of joke. But actually, no, they're... Ironically. There are a much valued advertiser. And I think it's very good target marketing, really, from Optus, because they can guarantee that the only people who heard those Optus ads

were non-Optus users that day. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I mean, it is increasingly a parody of a telco. Yeah, that's right. And not even a very convincing one. At that... If I ran a telco, it would be Optus.

It would be. Optus are only moments away from saying yes, to avocado pool toys, I feel. I'm still reeling from them having leaked my details on the dark web and having to just change everything. Just this whole thing of having to... I stopped all my credit checks on my account. It was huge inconvenience. And they gave us literally nothing in response,

other than just some bullshit apology letter. Why am I still with them? Well, because they're the least crap telco where I live in terms of reception. So I'm kind of stuck. I can't go anywhere else. Well, Dom, I have a theory. I actually have a theory about why it went on. Oh, yeah.

And I haven't seen it reported anywhere else. But I think it's actually true. Because everyone's been going, why didn't they handle the PR side of it better? Like, why didn't they, as soon as all their networks went down, why didn't they ring up the journalists and get on the front foot? Well, duh, it's because they couldn't use their phones. They couldn't get on the front foot with journalists. journalists because they couldn't contact them, you morons.

I love that when the CEO rang into ABC Radio, she had to use WhatsApp on Wi-Fi because her phone didn't work. But how did her Wi-Fi work? She must have been using Telstra or something. Well, actually, I would imagine she went over to the Telstra store and used their free Wi-Fi. Anyway, I'll go to the theory, which is, so on Wednesday the entire Optus Network goes down, the same day the Australian tax office release all the corporate tax

cheats of 2021-22, right? This is all the big companies, the big 800 companies and how much tax they paid, including a whole list of companies who paid no tax at all, despite earning hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars in revenue. And guess who happened to be on that list, none other than Optus themselves. So I reckon what has happened. And it's not just Optus, It's Rio Tinto, IAG, ExxonMobil, AGL, Quantus, Shell, down a QBE. Like, so many companies not paid a single cent of tax in the 2021-2020 tax season, right, including Optus. And I reckon those group of companies got together and went, you know,

what better way to underreport this whole story than to just stop the networks? They just stop the reporting. And they got together and Optus went, well, yeah, we're in for it. because we didn't buy any tax, and then no one's noticed. Charles, you're being really unfair to Optus, and I don't normally defend them, but you're saying they're not paying any money at all to the government. I completely challenge that. They're paying a vast amount of money to the Singaporean government,

which owns Singtel, or at least a majority sharing in Singtel, through their investment company, Tamarsec Holdings. It's a massively successful government-owned business of the sort that we're not allowed to have in Australia anymore because they all got privatised. In Singapore, they didn't privatise them. They made them efficient and so efficient. in fact that they're able to provide a massive income stream for the Singapore

government like Singapore Airlines like many many other businesses but they don't pay tax in Australia because in Australia what they've done is make it as lean and as efficient as possible which only governments can do Charles forget the private sector the most efficient businesses in the world are Singaporean government owned telcos that don't invest in infrastructure and have crap customer service in Australia but it's genius business running we should get the Singaporean government to buy the chaser I must say if you set up a telecommunication company and you don't spend any money on providing telecommunications or personal data safety, then that is a very profitable business model.

That is the best business model in the world. You get 40% you sign up 40% of Australians to use your mobile service. Don't give them the service profit. I mean, I don't understand why Telstra and Vodafone don't do that as well. And you make your slogan, yes, right? Brilliant bit of marketing. Yes. The great thing about that is that it doesn't ask what the question is. Is opt as crap? Yes. Would you be a fool to sign up? Yes. Should I have left years ago? Absolutely yes. It's the yes, Charles. Do you not pay any tax? Yes. Do you funnel vast amounts of money into Singapore? Yes. So in some ways we're being a bit unfair because it's not that they don't pay any tax to governments. Because if you added up all the sum total of tax that they paid to all governments around, the world, it would be vast.

It's just not our government. Not our government, no, because we have this insane idea that the private sector is more efficient than a well-run public sector, completely disproved in much of the world, of course. We have this idea, oh, we couldn't possibly have a government-owned telco that would, for years ahead in the future, provide a revenue stream so that Australians would actually own something for once. No, no, let's sell all the mines to the private sector. Let's privatise all of our telcos for a one-time cash hit, but then we'll be.

means that they're foreign-owned. I mean, it's just absolutely insane. It's all lefty on you, but the Singaporean government is amazingly good. The only thing that they're better at than running Telco's Charles is stifling political dissent. They're very efficient at that. It's very efficient. Absolutely. It's a well-run society. Okay, so I think we've got to brainstorm what the government should get into the business of so that we can be a bit like the Singapore government and buy up a few businesses to run ourselves so that we can be a little bit like on the Singapore and grift, where we can just sit back and count the money as taxpayers.

Well, that's one option. We should explore that. But I should also note that there is another possibility, Charles. I am. Which is that we outsource the Australian government to Singapore. To Singapore, yes. And we get Singapore to run Australia offshore and do so much more efficiently. Presumably, though, what they do is make the Australian government much more profitable, but for them.

So maybe that wouldn't be the most pleasant society to live in. But also, isn't the point that it also wouldn't work? Like, you'd have days where the entire government just shuts down and they don't even bother to tell the journalists what's going on. They just stop working. To be fair, it's not a core skill. It's not a core skill of a Singaporean enterprise is public accountability. No, exactly.

It's not really baked into the business model of Optus to actually provide some sort of transparency. And also, there's enough downtime in the Australian Parliament. You go, you know, some days they are offline, aren't they? I mean, sort of... There's true. There's a lot of outages. But you could even say that the main business of the Australian government is doing nothing. And that very occasionally, they actually all go to work there and do something.

And that's the outage. I think that's the abnormal situation, something happening. Yes. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most, when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecues lit, but there's nothing to grill, when the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. So I've got to pitch for you, Dom, about which business the Australian government should take over and nationalise as part of your lefty idea of the government actually starting to run things again in Australia. And that is we work. We work.

We work. So hear me out here. It's a really great business. What you do is you take out long-term leases on commercial property and incur a huge amount of risk in doing so because you've signed a third year. year lease to pay that lease every year for 30 years. And then you make the money back by renting it out to small businesses a month at a time on a sort of subscription model and hope that they don't go broke, even though small businesses go broke it all the time.

And the Australian government should just get into that business because that sounds like a perfect business model. And, you know, like, I don't know, like it was we work. It's like worth $40 billion. Like that's exactly the sort of. Yeah, I read a book about this. Yeah. I read a book about the amazing business of WeWork.

And what you've got to do, and Adam Newman, the founder, was a particularly brilliant. Genius. What you've got to do is you start a business that's a very simple thing. Like it's very clearly a property business. Whereas you say, you're renting very expensive office space and you're then packaging it up and selling Hot Desk memberships and so on to other companies. So you can leave at any moment, for instance, since I don't know, there's a global pandemic and no one wants to work in offices anymore.

But what you do, Charles, is you don't at all worry about profitability. You don't worry about having enough money coming in to cover the cost to the business. And to be fair, we in the Chaser have known this for years. You don't worry about having enough money coming in to actually cover the expenses. What you do is you build it up with a massive amount of tech hype so there's a massive bubble and you convince investors that you're not a property company. You're some kind of amazing highfalut and internet business that's just going to keep growing and growing and so charles when you can't pay your bills in any given month all you do is just get more money

from investors and just get more silicon valley investors to buy in and start talking about building a wee community and you start we schools and wee housing and we everything else and talk about this this we world that you're building whereas in fact every single month you're losing money and then losing more money and then what you do is charles this is the really clever bit you get a japanese investor i think is my hashi son his name was the founder of soft bank to come in you pitch him somehow and mesmerise him and getting to put billions more in. So you can invest everywhere. So you open hundreds of new offices all over the world, all of them losing money at

once, but then there's a pandemic and you have to declare bankruptcy. Other than that, though, it's a very good idea. So that happened yesterday. Yesterday, we were declared bankruptcy. And I was very surprised because I thought that they had already declared bankruptcy. I thought we were to the fold of about a year ago. They've already had a major. They had a few issues where the founder had to resign and they got taken over.

I think directly by SoftBank and so on. Yeah, but no, this is the full, full on formal bankruptcy phase. So what does that mean for the future of wankers in business? I mean, well, look, is there a future for them? It's going to be very hard for them to. They'll have to go back to coffee shops, Charles. I was a we work member once. I've been a wee work member. And let me tell you, it's, it's very seductive. It's a great business model. Charles, I had a full month of going around and swaning around and thinking I was, you know, in this sort of new tech generation. And I was a founder. briefly.

Yes, yes. Love being a founder. I drank their fruit water. Did you remove all the vows from the proper nouns that you used? Yes, I did. I became dum. Did you become dumnut? Yeah, it was dumnut.

That's what I was, Dumnut. And I went to a wine and cheese event. I got lots of free food. I basically, I wrote a lot of a book in a Wework actually and had a great time. There's just one thing I didn't do during my month that Wework, Charles. Oh, yeah. And that was pay. I didn't pay for being a member.

They gave me a month-long sample and then said, would you like remain as a member for $400 a month? Then I was like, $400 a month. No way. But it was a very enjoyable trial month. I really recommend using their facilities for free. I just wouldn't. And on their balance sheet, they would have marked you up as we've got a new member.

Yeah, new member. That's right. Well, Dom, you see, I think the Australian government, like, that's, you know, when a company goes bankrupt, you can buy it for pennies on the dollar. I think that that's what we should be doing. The Australian government should be buying up WeWork and getting into business again. Yeah, re-nationalise industry.

Start with We work. You're great. We'll make tons of money. Charles, I mean, there is something that the government could open that would absolutely be guaranteed to make money. Oh, yeah. Like, it's literally 100% certainty of success. Oh, yeah.

Which is a bank. They actually have the People's Bank. Yes. Imagine if instead of Visa and MasterCard clipping the ticket every time we tapped on because no one uses cash anymore, What if the government clipped the ticket for the 2% and whatever it is instead of Visa and Mastercard and got all that money? Yes. Imagine the amount of tax they'd collect.

They'd be as rich as the banks, which are very rich. That's a great idea. And we could call it, so the Commonwealth Bank, because it would incorporate the whole Commonwealth. Or National Australia Bank. Yes. Yeah? Or the Australian and maybe a New Zealand bank. Yes.

I love the idea. Let's do that. And because the thing is, that's how you make money. Because that's my wealthy friend that we both know who gave me that advice. years and years ago, which was how to be rich is to just own shares in banks. And that was his sort of thing. And it sort of presupposed having the money to own shares in banks. But, you know, that's the key to wealth. So yeah, we get the government to do that. That's very revolutionary, Dom. I don't, I can't believe no one's ever thought of that before.

All Australians, Charles, would actually own shares in a bank, in a sense. Because we'd all own part of this financial institution. So when it made three or four billion dollars profit in any given Yes. We wouldn't be angry and feel that there was a, you know, sort of quadropoli going on that was squeezing this. We'd be like, great. We'd be cheering and long. That's our money that we're making.

That's less tax we've got to pay. Yes. And we'd go, oh, look, I really like that credit card surcharge that I got whacked by that cafe that clearly is overcharging me on the surcharge, even though that's illegal. That's right. It's taking money out of one pocket and putting it back in another because I get to keep the profits. That would work, Charles.

It would work so well until one second into the next liberal government, where they would privatise the bank and then use the money from that to fund tax cuts for rich people. It would be a fibre-to-the-curb bank. They'd come in and they'd go, the bank's allowed to do everything other than handle money. Yes, yes, you can handle transactions.

You can open an account with them and you can even deposit money in there. But you've got to do it really slowly. You can't actually touch it all. Yeah, you're only allowed 10 cents a day. You've got to post them banknotes. Yeah. It's so true.

Oh, God, I'm depressed. Why does every episode end in generalised depression, anxiety disorder? But Charles, no, there's another solution, just before we go. There's another thing that the government could get into. I can't believe we haven't thought of it before. Tatai. The Australian government could open a telco. Oh, yes.

And run a telephone network that actually covered the whole of Australia. That would be like a telecom. It could be like Telecom Australia or something. It could. It could be called Telecom Australia. I mean, ironically, we already own the NBN. I'm amazed they haven't privatised that yet. Yeah.

I think that's because no one, who would buy the NBN? Who would buy it? Yeah, that's right. I'll tell you who would buy the NBN. Optus would buy the NBN. Optus would, yeah. So all that the government would need to do is just whack a bunch of cell phone towers on the NBN. Oh, wait a sec, that would deliver NBN quality service to everyone.

No, no, we can't, we can't do that. Our gear is from road. We're part of the Iconacless network and catch you next week. hope this lets us connect. Who knows? What's better than a well-marbled rib-eye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper

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