Australians racist, backward, says Sol

So, a businessman Aussies love to hate says Australia is backward and racist. “I would say that Australia definitely is different [from] the US,” he told the BBC. “In many ways it was like stepping back in time.”

Australian political and business leaders are flabbergasted.

Sol Trujillo — not the Sol you might have been thinking of — was never popular with the country he called home for four years, and many are viewing his criticism as a final middle finger to the the land down under. Brought in to run Telstra — the antipodean equivalent of Telkom — just before the government sold it for $30-billion in 2005, Trujillo and the two American senior managers he brought with him were soon dubbed the “three amigos”.

In a country that prides itself on a more egalitarian, less American approach to business, Trujillo was always going to be disliked. He was constantly at loggerheads with the Australian regulators, accusing them of being anti-business while at the same time fighting hard to preserve what was left of Telstra’s monopoly. In constant conflict with the unions, he was blamed for a drastic decline in customer service — all the while taking home a cool $30-million during his four year tenure. $11-million of that was a golden handshake. (Also, he was unattractive and sported a silly little moustache. Of course the Aussies had no time for him.)

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s response when he finally left? “Adios”.

Rudd’s admittedly rather unbecoming farewell simply echoed a history of Mexican jibes aimed at a man who was born in the US and not even fluent in Spanish — indicative, said critics, of racist attitudes. Cartoonist Mark Knight has hit back, arguing that Trujillo did not understand the use of metaphor. “The Three Amigos caricature was largely symbolic of his management style,” he said, explaining that he often depicted Trujillo in a sombrero because the man’s similarity to a Mexican gangster.

The analogy was made, argued Knight, largely because of Trujillo’s inept management of Telstra:

“Under Sol’s watch, the Telstra share price went south of the border. And I don’t just mean down to Tijuana, I mean all the way to Panama. Add staff morale at Telstra. That went as far as Bolivia. As for customer satisfaction, it was last seen in a life raft off the coast of the Falkland Islands.”

Others have pointed out that Trujillo himself was happy to use xenophobic arguments when it suited him. One Telstra brochure sent to voters before the 2007 Federal Elections warned against the unfairness of allowing foreign-owned companies to compete with Telstra:”Like leeches, foreign companies are encouraged by lopsided regulations to act like parasites on Telstra’s infrastructure, milking the investments of Telstra’s 1,6-million shareholders.”

Is it too easy to dismiss Trujillo, the Bush supporter who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the McCain presidential campaign? Columnist Adele Horin argues that, in the wake of the Cronulla riots, anti-Islamic sentiment and Pauline Hanson, Australians should pay attention to Trujillo’s message. “Trujillo lacked a sense of humour,” she admits. “He misunderstood the references to his Mexican heritage — the “Adios”, and the “three amigos”. Unlike Americans, Australians have no tradition of anti-Mexican prejudice. The words did not carry racist meaning. But just because he got so much wrong should not be reason to discount his comments. We have no reason to be smug.”

I wonder what South Africans would have made of Sol if he ran a company here. Call him Sol the drol perhaps, a name which undoubtedly suits him. Whatever he made of our strange, eccentric land, one thing is for certain: if he ever tried to play the race card here, he’d be trumped. Because nobody is better at accusing others of being racist than South Africans.