Be careful he might shear you

“Why on earth did you buy this dump?”So says our Telstra correspondent.

One of the delights of the Aussie Wit in the lucky country is their direct no-nonsense approach to communication. They see a spade and nothing will dissuade them from expressing an opinion on its use as digging equipment.

Now there are many good things about moving to a life down under. The Sun. The Beach. The Quaint trade practices that the mother country abandoned 20 years ago.

Like, for example, the curious way that Telstra will insist on sending around to your house a fully qualified telephone engineer to plug your telephone into your socket, in the rather curious 1950s belief that this is way beyond any homeowner’s capabilities. After all, these modern speaking devices are very complicated bits of machinery.

Bright new upstart companies have tried for many years to break into the Australian telecoms market, but Telstra still insist on employing legions of engineers, at vast expense, and then charging their competitors for the service.

Occasionally, politicians do try and save households money by introducing proper competition law into Australian, but they're faced with the unions and a dominant industry. Oh, and a hung parliament, which doesn't help.
And so, I get an engineer who comes round, and plugs in the phone. He doesn’t do anything particularly constructive, like work out the extension wiring, or even something as basic as plugging in the internet. Suggestions that he might are like water off a sheep’s back.
He does however give his judgement on the place. “Bit of a dump isn’t it. Heritage listing means you can’t even change the paint colour without a DA. Why on earth did you buy it when you could have a modern house like everyone else?”
Exactly.