Mobile telephone fraud and regulatory capture

Regulatory capture happens when an industry regulator falls under the influence of those that they are supposed to regulate. That would seem to have happened in the case of Australia's telephone regulator -- the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). I have found that out from my personal experience. The TIO seems to believe anything that service providers in the industry tell it.

What happened was that scammers somehow accessed my Vodafone cellphone account and rang up a lot of text-message charges against me. When I eventually realized what was happening and protested vigorously about it to Vodafone, they eventually refunded me the disputed charges. Before doing so however, they forwarded me an absurd email from the scammers which said that only I could have incurred the charges. Vodafone apparently accepted that bit of fantasy as correct so gave me an "ex gratia" refund only.

I was outraged at this slight on my good name and character and asked Vodafone for more details that would allow me to track down who exactly had been misusing my account. Vodafone refused to tell me anything further, however. They would not even tell me whether the charges were for messages that I had supposedly sent or for messages that I had supposedly received. Since I haven't even figured out HOW to send text messages on my current phone, that was a very relevant detail.

So I protested to the TIO about this stonewalling from Vodafone -- and also protested that the scammers had not apparently been in any way restricted and were free to carry on defrauding others.

I have received today a letter from TIO reviews officer Olivia Munro which just rubs salt into the wound. They have refused to do anything about my complaint and they too appear to have accepted without investigation that the fantasy letter concocted by the scammers was true, correct and factual. Australia's major banks lose big money to scammers but that the little guy might be similarly affected seems not to have occurred to the useless TIO. My only recourse now is to take the matter to court and I have not yet made my mind up about that.

So DON'T rely on your government to protect you. Insist that all bills are mailed to you in paper form so that you can examine them carefully and refer to them in the future. And DON'T authorize anybody to take money out of your bank account directly in settlement of what you owe. Pay all your bills yourself rather than authorizing automatic deductions from your account. You may never see your money again otherwise.




Rudd's wife violates her own husband's job "principles"

Once again we find Leftists thinking that they are an elite who do not have to comply with the restrictions that they want to impose on "the common herd". Al Gore has his Australian counterparts

A COMPANY owned by Kevin Rudd's wife put workers on individual contracts that stripped them of key award conditions. A common law contract, obtained by the Herald Sun, removed penalty rates, overtime and allowances for an extra 45c an hour. Workplace Minister Joe Hockey said the contracts could be illegal and he would investigate the matter further. "For a common law contract to remove conditions from an award would be unlawful but I need to get more information," he said today. "There seems to be a lot of questions that need to be asked about this matter."

The deal offered a $30,000 annual salary, or $576.93 a week. This is only marginally better than the $29,219 legal minimum ($560.11 a week) applying to the most junior class of worker in the industry. The offer did not include meal and travel allowances or loadings for work performed outside normal hours. The June 2006 contract noted that workers were covered by the Community Employment, Training and Support Services Award.

But the Herald Sun received legal advice that, if the contract were followed to the letter, the deal would be worse than the award and most likely fail the old no-disadvantage test that Labor wants to restore. The contract is not an Australian Workplace Agreement, and under the law, should not undercut the award.

Mr Rudd's wife, Therese Rein, is a multi-millionaire businesswoman whose companies employ 1400 workers in Australia and Europe. Her firm Ingeus is a global player in the employment and recruitment sector and last year achieved revenues exceeding $170 million. WorkDirections Australia Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Ingeus, took over Frankston company Your Employment Solutions last year and transferred its workers over to her business.

Last night, WorkDirections Australia admitted that workers had been underpaid. After inquiries by the Herald Sun, a director said workers' entitlements had been reinstated. He said former staff were being traced so they could be reimbursed.

The revelation comes as Mr Rudd stakes his claim for the prime ministership on restoring fairness to industrial relations. Ms Rein's WorkDirections job contracts removed some of the very conditions her husband wants to give back to workers. The Opposition Leader said in a recent speech that a Labor government would "restore the rights of working families to have proper access to penalty rates, overtime and shift allowances".

Labor MP Tanya Plibersek said Ms Rein's business was a separate issue to her husband's politics. "She's an independent person who's running a business," Ms Plibersek said. "Therese has said and Kevin has said in the past that she will run her business at arms length from any Labor government should we be elected. "Any decisions which are made about her businesses in the future will made independently, she'll be treated like any other business."

WorkDirections director Greg Ashmead blamed former management for the irregularities and said employees' conditions had been reviewed this year. "The terms and conditions of all current staff now mirror and mostly exceed the minimum terms and conditions of the award," he said.

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Muslim pests driving cabs in Australia too

Applying their version of Sharia law in defiance of Australian law. Decent people are kind and helpful to blind people but kindness and helpfulness must have got left out of the Koran

TAXI drivers regularly refuse to carry blind passengers with guide dogs - including Australia's Human Rights Commissioner - with many citing religious reasons, or other excuses like allergies. Human Rights and Disability Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes, who is blind and reliant on his guide dog Jordie, is a regular Sydney cab user and said he was refused service on average once a month, including twice in two days recently. He has been told on a number of occasions that it would be against a driver's religion to allow a dog in the cab. Mr Innes has also been refused by drivers claiming to be allergic to dogs - or afraid of them - and was even left clutching at air on busy Market St by one belligerent driver who told him he had to take the non-existent cab in front.

Mr Innes yesterday received the backing of Vision Australia (VA), which said taxi drivers refusing to carry blind passengers with guide dogs happened with "too much regularity". VA policy and advocacy head Michael Simpson said that the problem was worse in the Sydney metropolitan area where there were more drivers unwilling to carry dogs based on Muslim objections. "It is fair to say that the (Islamic) religion has made the problem worse in the metropolitan areas than regional areas, where I've found taxi drivers are generally excellent," he said.

Mr Simpson, who has been blind for 30 years but uses a cane instead of a guide dog, said he was refused service at the airport because his two companions had dogs. "We asked the driver for his accreditation number and he gave us the wrong one," he said. It was only because an airline staff member had accompanied us that we got the right number and could properly complain about being refused."

Mr Innes was compelled to speak out after the Daily Telegraph last week revealed how an intellectually impaired man had been slapped with $1000 in train fare evasion fines even though he cannot understand what the offence is. He called for better training for all front-line public transport staff in NSW in dealing with disabled passengers. "I'm a lawyer and I know exactly what my rights are so I force the issue but my concern is for those for whom a refusal can be a damaging experience and discouraging," Mr Innes.

NSW Taxi Council spokeswoman Tracey Caine said complaints about refusing guide dogs were rare. "The problem has been much worse in Melbourne," she said. Ms Caine said all NSW drivers were spoken to by disability advocates as part of their training and there had been a number of awareness campaigns in the industry publication Meter Magazine: "It is illegal to refuse to take a guide dog and all drivers know it."

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The anti-democratic Leftist media

Comment below by Greg Sheridan

THIS week I had the considerable pleasure of meeting a genuine hero, a military hero and a democratic hero, a moderate Muslim and a hero in the struggle for democratic self-determination. I refer to Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. A long-time Kurdish freedom fighter, he has been an indefatigable campaigner for Iraqi human rights and democracy.

Note, therefore, this incredible occurrence. Zebari held a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on Monday. Yet The Age in Melbourne, the nation’s most left-wing newspaper and the paper that has most strongly opposed every aspect of the coalition action in Iraq, did not see fit to print a word about it on Tuesday. This is as glaring a case as you could imagine of simply not reporting the facts because they don’t fit your preconceived narrative.

The Age has spent tonnes and tonnes of newsprint excoriating the coalition efforts to liberate Iraq from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and give it a chance of establishing democracy. But it certainly did not want to hear the views of an Iraqi who has the legitimacy of 12 million Iraqis voting three times so that he could be Foreign Minister.

This is, sadly, all too representative of the irrational turn the Iraq debate has taken, where nobody is the slightest bit interested in any evidence that does not support their already held position.

The Australian carried my interview with Zebari yesterday and I don’t intend to recapitulate it here, except for one central consideration. This is what he said would be the result of a rapid pullout from Iraq by the coalition forces led by the US and including Britain and Australia. Zebari said a rapid coalition pullout would mean: “The country would disintegrate, it would be divided. There would be civil war, slaughter, sectarian war. There would be mayhem. International terrorists would find there would be a safe haven in Iraq, a much more important and sympathetic safe haven than they found in Afghanistan, and they will attack others from there. Iraq’s neighbours will be tempted to cross its borders and establish zones of influence there.”

Now here’s the thing. If Zebari is right, rapid withdrawal would be an unmitigated strategic disaster. It would be a tremendous victory for the terrorists and nothing would be more likely to cause conflict within the Middle East. Yet that is the logic of Labor’s position under Kevin Rudd, with the important qualification that Rudd would withdraw Australian troops after consultation with the US and not necessarily suddenly.

This is an issue that very few people discuss honestly. This is a US-led operation and the key question is when the Americans leave. Either they will leave because their own political will collapses or because the Iraqis can finally take care of security themselves. If it is the former, then the disastrous results that Zebari sketches are a strong possibility. If it is the latter, then the whole Iraq mission has been redeemed and the infamy of a genocidal tyrant justly brought to a close.

But in much of the Western debate, not least in Australia, you get the impression that commentators hate George W. Bush and John Howard more than they love the Iraqi people. Just as the international Left cared not a fig for the human rights of Vietnamese, Cambodians or Laotians, and in general didn’t mind a genocide or two once the communists were in power, so too you get the feeling they will rapidly lose interest in any amount of suffering by Iraqis provided the Americans and their allies have been comprehensively humiliated.

The other intriguing aspect of Zebari’s visit was his general praise for the Australian troops in Iraq and his report that they enjoyed a very high reputation in Iraq. This is significant in part because it echoes what several other critically credible sources have said in the past few weeks. It also demolishes the proposition of the Australian Left that somehow or other our participation in Iraq, which by the way is under the authorisation of a UN resolution, is somehow damaging our international reputation.

Ali A. Allawi, a former defence and finance minister in recent Iraqi governments, has written the definitive account of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, entitled, appropriately, The Occupation of Iraq. In it he deplores the amateurism and incompetence of some of the staff of the Coalition Provisional Authority under the leadership of Paul Bremer. However, he goes out of his way to contrast this with the professionalism of the Australians, especially the Australians involved in reconstruction.

Similarly, the recently published memoirs of the former chief of the CIA, George Tenet, are instructive on this point. Tenet has become a critic of Bush and his memoirs are designed to limit his guilt by association with the Iraq operation and put as much distance as possible between himself and the Bush administration. His remarks on Howard, though - again, strangely unreported - are instructive. He says that he and Bush agreed to delay the announcement of his resignation as CIA chief because Howard was due to visit and they didn’t want to detract from the attention the US media should pay to Australia’s Prime Minister. Tenet writes: “Howard had been one of our closest allies. Not only had he deployed troops to Iraq, but he’d also had the enormous political courage to say that he’d gone to war in Iraq not because of what the intelligence said but because he’d believed it was the right thing to do. The President didn’t want to do anything to step on Howard’s visit. Nor did I.”

This is much how many people see Howard internationally, unless they are dedicated haters of the coalition operation in Iraq. Australia, and Australia’s Government, are seen as immensely successful internationally.

The final word, though, belongs to Zebari. One of his most likable traits is loyalty to friends. I asked him if he had any sympathy for Paul Wolfowitz, the former US deputy defence secretary and a key architect of the operation in Iraq, who resigned this week as head of the World Bank. Zebari told me he had a lot of sympathy for Wolfowitz: “We Iraqis consider him a friend. He was a believer in Iraqi democracy. He has been criticised very unfairly. He was a close and determined friend of the Iraqi people and he never wavered in his commitment to our cause.” It is of course entirely right to receive a lesson in loyalty and consideration for a friend from a distinguished Iraqi democrat.

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A great Auusie gal

Her pansy critics are up themselves



AUSTRALIA'S Miss Universe representative has hit back at criticism that her lifesaver national costume is frumpy and an outdated cultural cliche. Kimberley Busteed yesterday shrugged off the widespread criticism as "funny" and said she would not be changing her outfit for Monday night's Miss Universe final in Mexico City. "It sounds like people are just bitching about it, instead of suggesting other things that could be better for next year," she told the Daily Telegraph yesterday.

"Do they want me to dress up in a convict's outfit or something? "I think that, no matter what you do, you are going to get that negativity - you are never going to please everybody." While other contestants from around the world went for full-on glamour in interpreting their national dress, the 18-year-old Queensland beauty donned red bathers and a swim cap at the competition's national costume ball on Sunday.

Busteed, who is in Mexico City in the lead-up to Monday's final, said she had received overwhelmingly positive feedback at the ball. "For me (the costume) is great - all the girls here loved it," she said. "Even Miss China, who can't speak English, came up and said, 'Australia, swim, Australia'. "It was a big hit - the crowd loved it, the supervisors loved it, everybody here is loving it."

Among those who have criticised Busteed's choice of costume were Sydney fashion designer Alex Zabotto-Bentley, who labelled the look frumpy. "Australians are buff and sexy and wear swimsuits, but not like this one - it looks like she picked it up at the airport terminal," he said. "Looking (at) what the others are wearing, they are over the top but they are also beautiful."

Busteed, who is a former junior swimming champion, said she stood by the decision to wear the true-blue outfit in Monday's televised final, which will be broadcast in 117 countries. "I think it's an excellent idea considering it is the 100th year of the lifesavers," she said.

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