From
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...013871,00.html
JOHN Howard's former No 2 spin doctor, David Luff, has taken a highly paid
position with Telstra, the company his old boss used to loathe.
Mr Luff will be spruiking the benefits of Telstra winning a contract worth
up to $30 billion -- $4.7 billion of it in taxpayer funds -- for a new
national broadband network.
He will also be arguing that Telstra should be neither split nor forced to
undergo any further internal separation to make its operations more
transparent.
But only nine months ago, Mr Luff was working for a government keen to see
Telstra cut its prices to competitors to encourage competition in the $34
billion a year telcommunications sector. Not to mention handing over a
$1billion regional broadband contract to Optus.
Telstra caused no end of problems for Mr Howard and his government.
After Sol Trujillo was hired from the US to run the company, he launched a
war against government regulations and brought the relationship with
Telstra's then-major shareholder, the federal government, to an all-time
low.
Mr Luff's ultimate boss at Telstra will be his former colleague David
Quilty, who less than three years ago was a senior cabinet adviser to Mr
Howard and yesterday stepped up to the role as Telstra's public policy and
communications supremo.
Day to day, Mr Luff will report to Andrew Butcher, a former public relations
executive with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in New York.
Mr Butcher was last month appointed to head an expanded media relations role
at Telstra in a widespread shake-up of the telco's corporate affairs group
pushed through ahead of the departure of Mr Quilty's predecessor, Phil
Burgess.
"David is a great bloke who has impeccable relations with journalists," Mr
Butcher said.
Mr Luff has been filing a regular column for The Sunday Telegraph, which is
owned by The Australian's publisher, News Limited. He is a former journalist
with The Daily Telegraph.
While Telstra's public relations team is littered with former Liberal Party
staffers, the company has also retained Labor-linked public relations
consultancy Hawker Britten to help sell its broadband message.