Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move Australian Greens amendment (3) on sheet 7487 revised:

(3) Page 23 (after line 10), after Division 4, insert:

Division 4A—State-owned essential services

29A State-owned essential services

     A grant or payment mentioned in this Part must not relate to a transaction that relates to the sale of State-owned assets that provide essential services.

This amendment effectively carves out essential services as being prohibited from the privatisation bender that the coalition appears to be embarking on. At the very least, with some of the accountability measures that the Greens, the Palmer United Party and other cross benchers have supported, we have raised the bar for some of the proposed privatisations that this government seems to be so obsessed with. I acknowledged in my contributions at the outset that we would not be supporting the bill. But we believe that, if the bill is to become law, some things should simply be off the table.

The amendment states:

A grant or payment mentioned in this Part must not relate to a transaction that relates to the sale of State-owned assets that provide essential services.

Under the Constitution, the states have responsibility for water, electricity, gas and other utilities. These are things that the private sector cannot easily provide. I have already outlined why the Greens and countless economists do not support the privatisation of state owned assets, particularly assets that provide essential services, and that is that they effectively have two characteristics: they supply essential goods and services and their core business is a natural monopoly.

One of the examples—which I think actually had cross-party support in the end, after Mr Turnbull, at the time as opposition leader, took the portfolio on from Senator Minchin—was that bringing the natural monopoly aspect of infrastructure, like the NBN, back into public hands is strongly in the public interest and then you let the market in at the retail level. At least the essential services can be accessed by a budget estimates committee and you can interrogate or cross-examine officers of these utilities and there are very clear lines of transparency and accountability. As soon as you privatise things, or even start outsourcing to a significant extent, things start disappearing behind blankets of commercial-in-confidence and you lose the ability to call people before budget estimates committee. In effect, you are giving up an important part of your democracy. When something goes wrong—when the lights go out; when water mains burst; when the file server goes down—what you really want underlying service provision are very clear lines of responsibility in the authority and democratic control and oversight over things such as upgrades and maintenance.

So the Greens, along with the majority of Australians, are completely opposed to handing over essential services—and that includes utilities and emergency services—to private operators. This amendment simply seeks to ensure that, in the event that this bill does pass this parliament, state-owned essential services like power, water, ambulances, firies and so on, are not services that can be privatised through this initiative. Some things should simply be off the table.