Since taking over in July as chief executive of Telstra, Australia’s dominant telecommunications provider, Trujillo has managed to upset many of the company’s local shareholders with blunt comments about how regulations are hurting its prospects. So even as he and his wife hunt for homes in Sydney’s toniest suburbs, shareholders large and small have been venting frustration with Trujillo – including the largest shareholder of all, the Australian government.

“I think it is the obligation of senior executives at Telstra to talk up the company interests, not talk them down,” Prime Minister John Howard told a meeting of legislators debating the company’s privatization this month, characterizing the behavior of Telstra’s new bosses as “disgraceful.”

Trujillo is one of the reasons why folks in the States always called his company “U.S.WORST”

In his latest salvo, Trujillo this month warned investors that net profit could fall as much as 10 percent this year.

More incendiary were comments by one of the three former USWest colleagues imported by Trujillo to help run Telstra, a group of men that the local media have dubbed “the three amigos.” At a dinner with journalists, Telstra’s communications and policy adviser, Phil Burgess, said he would not recommend Telstra’s stock to his own mother.

That Trujillo has managed to rile his new hosts so quickly may come as no surprise to those who remember his contentious tenure as chief executive at USWest and, more briefly at the European cellular operator Orange.

Telstra has the additional burden of being obliged to provide service to homes in Australia’s remote outback, where it faces widespread dissatisfaction. Howard’s junior coalition partner, the National Party, made ensuring continued investment in “the bush” a condition of approving Telstra’s privatization.

To get the votes necessary to approve the Telstra privatization, the government agreed to create a 2 billion-dollar fund that would invest in improving rural connections. It also agreed to force Telstra to separate its wholesale business of selling access to its network from its retail sales business, similar to the way that BT in Britain agreed to an operational separation to avoid being split.

I guess Howard is another self-titled conservative who forgets about fiscal good sense. When Trujillo and U.S.WORST sold out — Qwest had to spend million$ to repair and replace rural infrastructure that was worthless.