Going bush

OPINION: We have decided to decentralise, and that means getting out of town and into the bush.

No, we’re not going to open up a superphosphate store. We’ll still be doing ICT stuff but we’re going to make it big in rural and regional centres. Those farmers need some help with their PCs and phones and we’ve got the expertise they need.

Just recently Senator Coonan offered another $50 million to get the cow cockies onto broadband via her Hibiscus scheme and Rabid will be after a slice of that action quicker than you can slam the dunny door on the outback outhouse.

That’s as soon as we figure out how you use flowers to connect to the internet. Feel free to send in your suggestions.

And we’re also punting that the radical Nationals will hold out until the farmers get their $7 billion from the Telstra sell-off and that will mean plenty of customers with fat subsidies knocking on the door of Rabid Reseller franchises all across this wide brown land.

You didn’t think we were going to actually leave town ourselves did you? Heck no! Franchise is the name of the game these days.

The sign in front of the shop will say Rabid Reseller in huge letters but the small print will say ‘Independently owned and operated so don’t come whining to us when you get screwed’.

Of course we’ll support our franchise holders with a massive nationwide TV advertising campaign.

We negotiated a great deal with Austar to run our ads on their satellite TV service, which is what they all watch in the bush anyway, since they can’t get any free-to-air TV except the ABC.

Auntie won’t take our ads just yet but once the Senate sits this August those chardonnay-sipping socialists will soon see the light, and that light will be on the front of the privatisation express, heading straight at them.

We had a lot of fun making our own TV ads, and before you tell us we should have hired professionals, that’s not how it’s done in the bush.

We spent a lot of time watching the adverts of all the other rural businesses and it’s obvious that they like it to be amateur-looking outside the city.

You don’t want to look too slick or they’ll figure you’re out to fleece them, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Now Telstra says that 98 percent of the population can already use one of their mobile phones, but that leaves 400,000 people who can’t get a signal.

The new Rabid Radios™ will fill in the gaps in Telstra’s coverage for a measly government-subsidised $65 a month.

You do the maths. That’s a tad over $300 million per year going begging. You can’t expect a big company like Telstra to be bothered chasing petty sums like that so we shouldn’t have too much competition. We’ve heard they don’t like competition anyway.

Our franchise stores will also be offering Bush Broadband(tm) to our country cousins so they can enjoy the same level of spam email and dodgy websites that we take for granted in the city.

This offering will be based on our Rabid Relay™ internet access methodology, which we freely admit we stole from the National Farmers Federation. They might have had the idea but they didn’t plan to commercialise it, so we’re not feeling guilty.

We’ve struck a bit of a hitch with this new service that we didn’t expect: the trucks with the tin cans need to keep constantly moving slowly away from each other to keep the string between them tight and the rapidly rising price of diesel means we’re going to have to hit the government for another subsidy.

It’s not our fault that the price of oil keeps rising and we even went out and bought a stack of hedges. That was dud advice but they do look nice out the front of the country shops.

The new bush business model is looking good and the franchise forms keep tumbling out of the fax machine faster than we can process them.

Do yourself a favour and make the move to the bush today. There are hectares of subsidies out there just waiting to be harvested.

Gotta go! Customers waiting!