Telstra is the current product of a hundred years of monopolistic government owned telco.

They were forced into competition through providing wholesale access to the copper network in various formats, but they've retained ownership of the CAN.

Basically no matter who you get your landline or DSL services through, it's going over a bit of Telstra owned copper at some point.

Things are changing somewhat with the NBN rollout, but not necessarily for the better.

They own all the actual cable in Australia. So are essentially our only tier 1 ISP. Everyone else just needs to buy services from them.

The copper pair and HFC lines in NBN areas are transferred into the ownership of NBN Co (though the ducts that they lie in remain Telstra assets).

Yes... but the Government failed to ensure Telstra didn't becoming the monopoly on infrastructure.

When the government decided to privatise Telstra, they had two choices: (a) split it up and sell the bits separately, or (b) sell it whole. Option (a) would have maximised competition but reduced the sale price, option (b) means less competition but more one-off revenue for the government. So, which one does the government choose? Option (b), of course!

At the end of the day there was only one set of local loop copper going out to each residence. So no matter how many pieces it had been broken up into, each household was still going to face a monopoly owner of the last mile infrastructure to their residence.

They could have split retail from wholesale. So the wholesale company would have owned the local loop, but consumers couldn't directly buy from them, they'd be able to choose between retail resellers. Which is basically the current NBN model anyway.