The Overseas Telecommunications Commission: 1960s trend-setter for public enterprise reform
Martin, Ian · Swinburne figshare (Swinburne University of Technology) · 2011
The Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC) was a publicly-owned corporation created to takeover responsibility for Australia’s international telecommunications after the Second World War. Established by nationalising existing assets as part of a network of public corporations in British Commonwealth countries, and overseen by a board comprising representatives of each of the members, OTC was international and commercial from the outset. This paper explores its history as a precursor to the reforms of government business enterprises in the 1980s, interpreting it as a pioneer of new ways of doing business in the public sector. Ian Martin is a Senior Research Associate at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, working on the ARC-funded Discovery Project ‘Imperial Designs – Remaking the Institutions of Global Communications’, and a Senior Telecommunications Analyst at RBS Research. He has been a telecommunications analyst for over 20 years since commencing research in 1988 on the review of Telecom’s universal service obligations. He was a research analyst and policy adviser in the Department of Communications on regulatory and policy issues behind the opening of the sector to competition in the early 1990s. In 1992 he worked on exchange with UK regulator Oftel and the FCC in Washington.