Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

On any objective analysis, public assets that have been built up using public funds and public toil will deliver a better return for the public if they remain in public hands. There is a very strong principled and political argument to say that, when you have electricity networks, public transport networks and road networks that have been built up for the common benefit over generations by the public, it should be the public that holds onto them and gets the benefit of them.

But, more importantly, any sensible economic analysis also shows that the public and consumers benefit from public assets remaining in public hands. There is a very simple reason for that. If you sell something off to the private sector, they will want to make a profit out of it. When they make a profit out of it, the costs get passed on to the public and the consumer, in the form of higher prices.

That has been the record in Victoria—for example, with the electricity network. What has been made crystal clear in Victoria is that from the 1950s until the mid 1990s, following integration and public ownership, real electricity prices across the country actually fell. But then in Victoria, after privatisation and after the reforms to the National Electricity Market, prices increased sharply and the reliability of the network went down.

There are a number of reasons for that, and I will come to that a bit later in my speech. But the point is this: if economically there is no argument for rushing to sell off public assets, then you have to wonder what the motivation behind this bill is. What this bill effectively does is create a slush fund for the next two years to bribe state governments to sell off public assets as quickly as possible. This comes in the context, of course, of the federal government axing funds to state governments. So $80 billion comes out of health and education and we rip up agreements around health and the like. State governments find themselves increasingly cash strapped. The government does not deliver on Gonski funds for schools. Then it turns around and says, 'I'll tell you what, sunshine—if you sell your assets in the next two years, we'll give you a cash payment.' That is effectively the federal government bribing state governments to sell things off as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, in Victoria, as I think is the case in New South Wales, we have state premiers and treasurers who are effectively the flying monkeys of this Prime Minister, who are prepared to go out and push the privatisation and toll roads agenda as quickly as possible. They are lining up for this fund to be established, because what the Liberal governments at the state level and at the federal level know is that the losers out of this will be the consumers, who will pay higher prices, but the winners will be the Liberal Party backers. You only have to look at who this Prime Minister appointed to his Commission of Audit and the large companies that they run to see who will benefit when public assets are sold off.

What we know, and what we have seen in Victoria over many years, is that when public assets are sold off they get sold off to the private sector, but the public—the taxpayer—bears the risk if the sale or the operation does not work out quite as planned. So you privatise the profits but you keep the losses in public hands. That is what we found in Victoria and that is what you find right across the country.

This bill makes no economic sense. The public is going to end up paying three times. Firstly, the public will lose an asset that in many cases generates returns for the community. So you lose the asset, and you only get to sell things off once. The idea that you balance the budget by selling off the farm is economic lunacy, because once you have sold it you do not get it back. You will get a short-term sugar hit, but after that you lose the recurrent income and you lose the asset forever. I do not know of many households who would decide that the best way to balance their weekly budget is to sell the home, but that is what this government is encouraging state governments to do.

You will lose the first time because you will lose the asset. The taxpayer will pay the second time because they will have to pay billions of dollars—money that will just go out the door to state governments. So you are paying to subsidise the state governments unnecessarily as well. You are going to lose the third time because, just as we found with electricity and just as we found with transport, it becomes more expensive. It is a massive cost-shifting exercise to make the public pay more so that the private sector gets higher profits and everyone loses out, except for big business and the financial funds that are bankrolling them.

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