THE NAMELESS bossy female voice that tells us, "At the tone, record your message; to end press hash or just hang up" takes 10 seconds to do so and costs those that ring on mobile phones or from out of town $250 million a year (or such is my calculation) that could be better spent on almost anything else.
What she says is not useful. You and your forebears have known for more than a century that hanging up a phone will end a call. You've already heard another voice, the one you called, ask for your message. The unknown woman's brisk command is one more Telstra way of making money it doesn't deserve.
That $250 million would build a nuclear submarine. Sustain 80 hospital beds for 100 years. Keep a small theatre going for 1000 years. Buy 1000 comfortable houses in the outer suburbs of Sydney.
The woman's message, by contrast, brings no good to anyone except a few shareholders in their early retirement in Sardinia, whose profit is soon augmented by the sacking of a thousand more telephone repairmen in country towns.
Some old folks with unrepaired phones will die of this boon to the rich, but no matter: this is rational; this makes economic sense; this is the way of the world; this is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.
And some still say it was a good idea to privatise half of Telstra, and a better idea even to sell off the rest. Your phone bill has risen with all those quaint extra charges. You can no longer get a human to tell you a number in another city, or not for a while. You have officious machines to wake you up and shrews to hear your complaints for 20 seconds before they cut you off.
And it was a good idea to privatise all of Telstra, so ''commercial necessities'' will rule the communications of a continent as big as Europe and as empty as the Gobi Desert. Not human need. Commercial necessities.
Please tell me why. No-one wants this kind of trouble, in city or town. Line repairmen want their jobs back. Their families want their old lives back. The towns they used to live in want their custom. Who has gained?
Though few have put a name to it, most people now want socialism government regulation of essential things like health and teaching and air travel and broadcast entertainment. And no major party wants to give it to them.
Though everybody wants it, they fear it might be unpopular. Think about that for a while.
This is how fashion-bound politicians have become. Though Thatcherism is hated, we must have more of it. Though democracies want Big Government, it must be downsized. Though taxes buy you civilisation, they must be reduced.
You must have more money in your pocket, now, for the moment before you spend it, say, on parking your car for $52 a day in the Sydney CBD or sleeping in a hotel for $250 a night.
Tax is only a cost. For the $52 you spent on a day's parking you can have a year's ABC. For the $250 you spent on a hotel bed you can have 10 weeks' public schooling for your child. For $300 better public schooling.
Taxing is a wonderful system. It means that instead of spending $250,000 on a brain tumour operation, as the Americans do, you get it for nothing or for the $20 a week you pay to Medicare.
It means that roads get repaired and towns, after flooding, cleaned up and yachtsmen rescued at sea in big storms. It means if your son gets into trouble in Thailand an ambassador may extricate him. It means ambulances arrive in the lifetime of the patient and you sleep safe in your bed.
Tax is only the cost of the good things that happen. It's money well spent on the good. It's money that would otherwise go down poker machines or into the pockets of pimps or the profit billions of loathsome nursing homes. Tax is terrific. I want it and the good things it buys back, and as many of them as there used to be.
Don't you?
Let's tell somebody.
Let's do the obvious.