Cool. Now stfu and advocate for the removal of mutual obligations. Anything less than that and you’re still a scab and class traitor. This issue is actually surprisingly simple, no mutual obligations = no tax payer money going to welfare frauds (JSP system). Then we can start discussing how to reform employment support and what that would look like. But any system that’s underpinned by mutual obligations will be deeply flawed.
Privatisation is the result of capitalists looking at everything and asking themselves “how could someone profit from this”? It’s not about running services more cost-effectively or making things easier on clients - it’s about filtering taxpayer money into private pockets.
Private companies aren’t naturally more efficient or less wasteful than government-owned entities - the streams of taxpayer money going to big banks, resource companies and others as subsidies should disabuse anyone of that notion. And arguably a large part of perceived government ‘inefficiency’ is due to the fact that they contract government projects out to private companies which then keep extracting money via “cost blowouts” and delays.
Privatisation is the result of capitalists looking at everything and asking themselves “how could someone profit from this”?
Most privatized assets are already very profitable - the rich wouldn't be trying to take it if it wasn't valuable. Balance sheet aside, public assets profit society as a whole.
I would say privatisation is the rich asking how fewer people could profit this.
This isn’t about assets though - it’s about government services. Things that aren’t designed to be profitable, that naturally will cost money to operate while not generally making money. By privatising these, they are now entities that have to make a profit, and that generally happens by extracting taxpayer money, as well as cutting cost, by reducing staff, service levels, equipment et al. That doesn’t make it more efficient - just more painful to use for clients. $9.5bn per year? Someone’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Literally no government service has ever run better once privatised. It’s always ended up more expensive and less effective. I have no idea why the idea that privatising services is a solution to anything except unsatisfied greed.
Commonwealth Bank isn’t really any different. Not better, not worse.
There was a good period there where Qantas was consistently getting better and cheaper than it was under public ownership. It’s gone downhill in the last decade, though.
Privatising the Post Offices has led to wildly variable experiences, some post offices are far worse, but if you have a good franchisee, some of them are much better.
I’m still dirty about privatising Medibank, and it cost the Libs 15 years in opposition. But today’s Medibank competes well in the private health sector.
Telstra … nah, just kidding. But it is getting better than it has been.
Maybe that’s the secret - it takes 20+ years for something privatised to get better? These examples have all been private since last century.
You need to factor in what privatising these things paid for as well. I don’t remember about any of my examples, but the WA government privatising elements of the land register and ports in the last few years has allowed it to fund Metronet.
Metronet is a long term major project that will help the population for decades.
The privatised Commonwealth Employment Service will never get better. The services offered by the private sector for job placement are utterly dismal. Personal experience via my then 55 yo partner being laid off from the mines up in Muswellbrook.
Every job he got after that, casual or permanent, were positions that I hunted down. They interviewed him once, right at the start, and not a single offer came his way from them in the ensuing 4 years that he worked or looked for work.
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