For most of the people I know one of the constant unexpected costs are the size and composition of their mobile phone bill.

My mother just got caught by entering an Optus competition. She had apparently subscribed to a service without understanding that it was going to cost her squillions every time she called to see about a prize. The information about the costs was somewhere in the text as was the fact that it was subscription but my mother is a little old lady who had no idea of what subscribing was, couldn’t read the information anyway and like most of us is not able to process long documents written in text smaller than a fly-spot.

My friend was caught when she was told a contract would only cost her a few bucks no matter how long the call etc etc. In all the complexity of the contract she missed some detail and it cost several hundred dollars before she realized there was something wrong.

We use these mobile phones as though they are blind poker machines. It is impossible to watch all that costs and why it is costing that much. The lack of information might have been forgivable in 1979 but this is the twenty first century and if mobile phones can carry images around the world, television, video conferencing and email then they can most certainly have a display that shows what you are spending as you spend it!

Politicians are not known for original ideas nor are they known for having a desire to complicate their lives by taking on big corporations and upsetting the comfort zones they operate in. Corporations who provide mobile phones make tens of millions of dollars fron the over-runs in our accounts and the mistakes we make about our contracts and those subscriptions. That is money they will have to learn to live without. The only way to get control of the hole in our budgets caused by this problem is to write or call local and federal politicians and let them know what you expect of them