Telstra has admitted that a contractor rigged an online ZDNet survey last month, which questioned whether the Telstra's BigPond Internet service provides value for money. The results were skewed dramatically in the carrier's favour and the contractor's services are now no longer engaged by Telstra.
Despite a confession from the national carrier that someone within its own ranks had manipulated the survey, it steadfastly refused to apologise - saying it couldn't control the action of its employees.
In a transcript of Monday's Senate Estimates viewed by ZDNet Australia, Democrats spokesperson for communications Senator Lyn Allison, raised the issue of the Telstra-tampered survey. Allison's questioning of Telstra's managing director human resources, Bill Scales, was supported by deputy Senate leader and Labor shadow minister, Stephen Conroy, and Labor's Senator, Kate Lundy.
"You would not have a problem with apologising, surely, if it was found that one of your contractors had in fact rigged the survey?" Senator Lundy questioned.
Scales said Telstra's "willingness or otherwise to apologise would very much depend on the way in which any one survey was organised and whether any appropriate checks and balances had been put in place to ensure that people did not manipulate the system - not only any contractor of ours or even any employee of ours - but any individual who might be part of that survey. There would be a number of circumstances where, on the face of it, it might seem unreasonable not to apologise but where there could be quite reasonable reasons why, if we felt that a survey was not appropriately conducted, we would not see it as appropriate to apologise."
Shadow minister for communications, Lyndsay Tanner, today condemned the telco heavyweight's refusal to apologise, and on what he described as Scales' -audacity" to suggest that Telstra's willingness to apologise would depend on whether the survey was appropriately conducted, he said: -The only evidence of any tampering of these particular surveys comes from Telstra itself."
-Telstra must also apologise to ZDNet. There are no excuses for rigging Internet surveys. Australia's largest corporation should be setting the standard for appropriate and ethical corporate behaviour in Australia," he said.
Telstra had not returned calls by time of going to press.
What a crock! No-one takes these things seriously. Everyone with a brain must realise they are manipulated by special interest groups all the time. Their statistical accuracy is zero.