John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to speak tonight in support of a number of motions I have before the Senate that are directly connected with the concerns of the workers, small business men, union officials, pensioners, single people, married people, families and the community in the Latrobe Valley. These people have been and continue to be forgotten. These people have suffered for 16 years continually after the privatisation of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria and the Latrobe Valley. Having visited there last week, in the towns of Moe, Morwell and Traralgon I fear that our greatest growth industries have been Centrelink, mental health and opportunity shops, providing food vouchers to people, to families, and help with the cost of their rising utility prices.

Privatisation has dismally failed the people. The SEC came about in the 1920s and 1930s because of the myriad of council and smaller generators that all did their own thing but, in all, failed to deliver equality of access to the basic utility of electricity. We know from history that the SEC provided many jobs to people and to many families. It provided apprenticeships, it provided people with a sense of self-worth through gainful employment and a sense of dignity that comes from work. The economy is there to serve the people; the people are not there to serve the economy. I note the sense of despondency that you see on people's faces in towns all over the Latrobe Valley. When you meet and speak to these people, you find they speak about their workmates, friends or family members who, unfortunately, have committed suicide or whose children are now going into their first, second or third generation of unemployment.

How can we not think of these people? They are not just in the Latrobe Valley. They are across the length and breadth of Australia in industries that have been devastated. Privatisation continues to cost the taxpayer because a lot of these companies, whether they are in public transport or the power industry or the green industry, do receive subsidies. While we often hear in government and in industry about the evils of subsidies, do we actually look at what the social benefits of subsidies are? While we talk about the mental health costs, about the costs of youth suicide and about the loss of life, do we weigh up the true cost? At the end of the day you cannot put a price on people. The people of Gippsland, particularly the people in these towns of the Latrobe Valley, have a very proud history. They want to work—they are not frightened of work—and yet a lot of them cannot work. We do not see from privatisation the same outcomes that we had when it was government controlled.

There is no doubt that privatisation remains the policy of the state government and the federal government today. To me what beggars belief is that we are setting up the NBN, which is funded by the government, yet we do not want to have a power industry that is funded by the government when we know that the SEC consistently delivered economically and socially to the community and that it did pay enormous dividends into consolidated revenue. Once again today we hear that privatisation continues and that we are hostage to ideologies, yet they are ideologies that do not serve the people. I would encourage all members, no matter where they come from, to visit the Latrobe Valley, to visit these towns and to talk to these people and give them some hope that we are listening to them and to their concerns. Ultimately what are we here for? We are elected by people; we are not elected by parties.