A message from the Assistant General Secretary
PRIVATISATION ... IN NO ONE’S INTEREST by Natasha Brown
The PSA recently partnered with the Hawke Centre to present a public forum: Privatisation… in whose interest? The purpose of this forum was to challenge the all-too-familiar claim that the public sector does not provide value for money; that private operators can successfully deliver better services at a lower cost and that this means it is in the public interest to sell them off. Backed by a wealth of evidence we know this is not true.
False promises The public knows from experience that the big promises of, for example, better quality electricity and water at cheaper prices were a con. Prices have increased; access, quality and reliability have declined, and costs to government have increased over the long term. These perceptions are reinforced by several decades of accumulating evidence on the inherent flaws in the nature of privatised for-profit services and the ongoing erosion of the public good and significant damages to workers, communities and the public as a whole. Nevertheless governments continue to pitch privatisation of public services as the solution to problems with costs and service delivery at the local level, maintaining the illusion of ‘balancing budgets’ in times when the need for ‘fiscal restraint’ is imperative. We need to be really clear that privatisation is not a ‘local’ solution to a
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‘local’ problem. It is a central component of several decades of neoliberalism and its influence on political, policy and funding environments across the globe. The arguments for privatisation are now as discredited as other aspects of neoliberalism like ‘trickle-down’ economics.
“ The arguments for
privatisation are now as discredited as other aspects of neoliberalism like ‘trickle-down’ economics.
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Mega-corporations benefit, not communities Privatisation has spawned the rise and rise of the giant global corporations with enormous lobbying capacity and political influence which now deliver a multiplicity of public services through their taxpayerfunded contracts with governments. It’s no secret that many of them structure their Australian corporate interests in such a way that they pay no tax in Australia. Alongside this are the vast powerful global consultancy firms who advise governments through their public sector consultancies and undertake endless reviews which almost inevitably recommend cutting and privatising public services and public sector jobs. Recent CPSU research shows how the big four consultancy firms have nearly tripled their income from federal government contracts since 2013, all while becoming among the nation’s most generous political donors.
Public Sector Review Magazine | AUGUST 2019
This is the context within which in just three decades from the establishment of Australia’s first private prison in 1990, the proportion of prisoners held in private facilities has grown from just under 2% to nearly 20% – the highest proportion per capita in the world – and the management and operation of private prisons is dominated by global corporations headquartered in Europe and the US. Similarly, the opening up of Australia’s public health system to private operators has seen the rapid rise of large corporate and private providers across key areas of public health – pathology, medical imaging and hospital-based care. We know that large foreign-owned corporations are growing enormously wealthy and powerful through provision of public services substantially funded by us – the Australian taxpayers – and that their corporate interests have been key drivers of rising living costs.
No accountability or transparency And we know that for too long, public accountability and transparency have been undermined by confidentiality and commercial-in-confidence arrangements between governments and private
