Only a brave politician would so boldly take on one of the nation's biggest companies, Telstra, in such a fashion as he has this week, not only demanding it deconstruct itself, but doing so by placing a metaphorical loaded gun to Telstra's head.

Telstra is now caught in the classic catch 22 - either it voluntarily splits off its wholesale business from its retail arm, or the Government will do it for them and penalise them to boot.

And yet, ironically, Telstra is still free to choose its own path to negotiate the best result it can within that seemingly rigid paradigm. To paraphrase what one Canberra tactician once told me, the best negotiators know how to simultaneously hug you with one arm and punch you with the other, which is what Conroy is attempting to do.

However, Conroy's goal is correct. There can never be effective competition in the retail telecommunications market when one player, ie Telstra, is dominant at every stage of production. The fact that it rents out its phone line network to rival firms automatically puts the competition at a cost disadvantage when selling retail packages to consumers.

In theory, splitting Telstra in two should be good for consumers. The trouble is that this should have been done in the Hawke-Keating era when competition was first introduced to the market, and failing that when the Howard government first moved to privatise the company. It would have prevented many of the arguments of the last decade.

However, the company is now privatised, albeit with the Government still as a major shareholder, which means the Government is not just pushing a policy for the betterment of the nation, but actively interfering in a commercial entity owned by thousands of mum and dad investors (and taxpayers). It's a level of intervention that would be frightening for many if it weren't also necessary.

While few now doubt his ticker, the question remains, though, whether he has the smarts to win the fight against Telstra where his predecessors failed. After all former CEO Sol Trujillo belligerance and Telstra's stalling tactics saw off Minister Helen Coonan's attempts to bring the company to heal on the issues of competition and broadband.