On Telstra’s employees:

“The nice thing about employees of Telstra is that they really care about their company. And some of them, that have already been redundant in terms of their jobs, they have let, they have sent me emails saying this is the right thing to do, ‘I’m sorry it affects me, but it’s the right thing to do.’ And I think that’s very important in terms of the culture that already exists in Telstra, because people care. They care about their customers. They care about their company.”

On how Telstra will grow:

“There’s two ways to grow a business. One is just to go take all the market share. This is not possible in a competitive marketplace. And the other way is to offer new services that can generate $5 a month, $10 a month, $20 a month on, and do it with enough segments where I’m getting enough new revenues and that’s where the growth is going to come from. I’ve done that before in Europe, running a company called Orange, where we started offering new services, new applications, but not only offering the services, making them easy to use. And that’s part of the differentiation, that’s how you create growth, because there is a principle in consumer behaviour that’s worked for thousands of years. You make it easy, people will use it.”

On Telstra’s position in its industry:

“We are the market leader. We’re going to act like the market leaders, we are going to lead. So whether it be on the broadband wireless side, or whether it be on the broadband fixed side, we are going to create lots of value for our customers. We are going to lead.”

On his tenure, and that of the senior executives he’s brought from the US:

“I didn’t come here just to come here and stir things up. I mean, that’s not why the board asked me to come, not why I came. I came here because I thought Telstra was a really interesting company that had a great set of assets that we could in face transition and create new products, new services and create new customer experience here that is second to none anywhere in the world. That’s why I’m here. And you can’t do that in a year, you can’t do that in two years. It’s going to take multiple years. So I understand that. I think the people I’ve asked to come understand that. but you can’t do it with three or four people. There’s well over 40,000 Australians that are associated with this company, that are part of this company and also part of the leadership of this company. You were at the meeting today. You saw those Australians, a couple of New Zealanders, that are part of that leadership team, and we’re all integrated, we’re in alignment, and they’re all amigos.”