Milton Dick (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

I have received a letter from the honourable member for Ryan proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The need to acknowledge that Australians are paying the price of privatisation, that privatisation has delivered nothing but pain for Australians through privatised profits, higher costs, and worse services, and that essential public services must return to public ownership.

I call upon those honourable members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

I propose this MPI today because Australians are being ripped off, and we're in this mess because of decades of bipartisan agreement between Labor and the coalition on handing our essential services over to private corporations.

Who else thinks that private energy retailers are pointless middlemen—scam artists, even, or ticket clippers? Origin, AGL, Alinta, Energy Australia—we have more than 40 electricity retailers in Australia, but they're all selling the same energy from the same grid. Private retailers are ripping us off, thanks to Labor's and the LNP's privatisation of electricity retail in the early 2000s. Since then, the real price of electricity bills has more than doubled. In the Queensland LNP government's latest budget they were spruiking cheaper power bills due to a lower default market offer.

The problem: if you're in south-east Queensland, you've been forced to use private retailers who have not passed on the lower prices and instead hiked their fees. Only regional Queenslanders are guaranteed a price decrease, because they are serviced by government owned Ergon Energy. The Queensland government decided to send Origin, one of the retailers that has hiked their changes, a letter asking them kindly to stop hiking their fees. But guess what? They can only ask nicely; they have absolutely no power to force them—because we privatised electricity retail, remember?

In 2024 AGL made $755 in profit per customer per year for household electricity. Origin made around $600 in profit per customer per year. That's you, the consumers, paying not for the electricity you use but instead paying the price of privatisation. What an absurd system, where we have these for-profit middlemen between often publicly owned electricity generation and the customer, who just wants cheaper electricity bills. Essential services like electricity should be in public hands. You get high bills, poor service, outsourced call centres, and outages, and the CEOs get enormous pay packages. The Optus CEO is on more than $3 million a year. Telstra's CEO took home $6.8 million last year, an 11 per cent pay rise, despite scandals.

The privatisation of telecommunications has been an absolute disaster for everyday Australians. We have retailers using the exact same infrastructure, just with different branding. Telstra and Optus both make billions each year in profit but cannot provide basic services properly. Optus doesn't even pay any tax. Across both networks, coverage is really poor, even in areas of my electorate less than 20 kays from the Brisbane CBD, in suburbs like Kenmore and Moggill.

Telstra and Optus are among the least trusted companies in Australia—for good reason. Then there's the NBN—same nonsense. NBN is publicly owned, apparently. So why are there dozens of different internet providers who don't do anything but take advantage of you, rip you off, with different fake deals? The market means you have a choice. You get to choose between dozens of middlemen offering the same thing and creaming huge profits off the top. This might be starting to sound like an 'old woman yells at cloud' moment, but seriously: what kind of system is this? It's great for the CEOs but terrible for the rest of us. Its' time for essential services to be returned to public hands.

And don't let politicians sell you fake solutions—a little bit of regulation here, a little subsidy there, a little tweak. It's all nonsense. It's all designed to distract and confuse, to make you feel like nothing can really be done, while companies still rake it in; they keep making record profits. But the solution is staring us in the face. We have to end 40 years of privatisation and corporate rule. For decades now we've had two major parties giving corporations a free ride. They sold off banking, energy, telecommunications, air travel, pharmaceuticals, public housing and employment services. They set up schemes where private corporations get cushy government contracts and charge the taxpayer exorbitant sums for subsidies rather than do the jobs themselves. And now we're all paying.

This country has got to get real about ending this scam. We've got to get real about bringing essential services back into public hands and putting everyday people back in control.

Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor believes in public services. Labor is the party that created Medicare. Labor is the party that expanded Medicare to deliver some 137 new Medicare urgent care clinics across Australia. It was Labor that legislated to ensure that the NBN stays in public hands. It was Labor that ensured that we have superannuation for all working Australians. It's in living memory of many in this place when it was just public servants and a few fortunate people in the private sector who had superannuation. Labor democratised it, and we made it available for everyone. We believe in serving the public, we believe in public services and we believe in Australia's Public Service.

I will note that I've got a lot of colleagues here who dedicated themselves to delivering services to the Australian public prior to coming into this parliament. The member for Maribyrnong fought for wages for public servants at Royal Perth Hospital in my electorate. The member for Banks served as a public servant and diplomat, serving Australia overseas. The member for Sturt recognised that there are some things that non-government organisations do better. She served on the board of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, something that is rightly owned by the community at large but strongly supported through government funding. The member for Deakin did one of the most important jobs of all—and I know that the minister who's at the table here will agree with this—serving the public as a schoolteacher.

I don't agree with the Greens that we should nationalise everything. I don't agree with that. I believe that parents should have choice of where they send their kids to school. I believe that people should have the choice of an industry super fund. I also remember the time not that long ago when the Greens party in Western Australia tried to set up their own bank. It wasn't a particularly good bank that the Greens party in Western Australia tried to run. They sent an email out to all of their party members saying, 'Lend us some money—and we'll pay you interest on that money—so we can fund our election campaign.' The problem was that the Greens party did not have a banking licence. It was sketchy as to whether they were complying with electoral rules. When the member said, in her short speech on her own MPI, 'Don't let politicians sell you fake solutions,' she missed out a single word: 'Don't let Greens politicians sell you fake solutions.'

I've always been sceptical about a party that says it campaigns for housing and then comes into this place and votes against it time and time again. I reflected on that when I visited Perth Hub in my electorate, a Housing Australia Future Fund funded project. It was a project that was public investment in public housing, something that this side of the chamber championed. Those in the Greens party—and there were more in the Greens party who used to oppose this—opposed these houses being built, so it is a bit rich to have a lecture about public services from the Greens party that indeed opposed housing in my own electorate.

That's not all. The member opposite did speak extensively about energy policy. I'll remind the member there's another grid in this country, the south-west integrated system. I proudly campaigned alongside my friends Mark McGowan and Roger Cook to make sure that we did not privatise Western Power, something that the Liberal Party had proposed. Again, Labor has a very proud history not just when it comes to protecting essential public assets. We also have a proud history of expanding them. But too often in this place we are fighting a fight where we have to ensure against those cuts and those attacks on public services that those particularly on the Liberal and National parts of the broader crossbench often propose.

We remember the 900 cuts that the coalition proposed to Medicare. We remember they set up a Medicare privatisation taskforce. Again, I'll remind the member that was the coalition, not the Labor government. We remember the $170 million of taxpayer money that was pumped into the coalition's privatised cashless debit card, the stealth privatisation of the vocational education and training system, and attempts to outsource visa processing and privatise the visa system. We know that they wanted to privatise the NBN, and we proudly, in this government, passed legislation to stop that from happening.

It's not just in those big, government owned enterprises but also in what we're doing in terms of reform to the Public Service. I draw the member's attention to the Australian Public Service Strategic Commissioning Framework.

This was a complex piece of work that we did when we first came to government to look at, from a cost-benefit perspective, how we make sure that we don't have excessive outsourcing in the Public Service. That's now been in place for more than three years, and it has saved millions and millions of dollars of taxpayer money and, at the same time, given better jobs to those who work in our Public Service.

I draw the member's attention to Budget Paper No. 4. Let's start at page 6. Page 6 will tell you, when it comes to that strategic commissioning framework 2024-25, agencies have brought more than $542 million of core work back in house. That was work that, under those opposite, was outsourced to the private sector. It's now being done by Australian public servants because we believe that the core work of the Public Service should be done by the Public Service, but we've got runs on the board to prove that we've done something about it. In terms of the projections for the coming year, we expect another $438 million of work to be brought back in house again. Maybe it's not the most exciting, but it's realistic, it's achievable, and this government is doing it. I want to pay huge tribute to Senator Gallagher, who's led that work across the government, going agency by agency to make sure that we can bring more of that work back in house.

Similarly, in the department I'm very honoured to assist the Prime Minister in, we have Australian Government Consulting, recognising that actually we don't have to be outsourcing all of this consulting work to a range of consultancy and accounting firms. The Public Service can do a lot of this stuff themselves. We just have to choose to do it, and this government chose to do it. We chose to set up Australian Government Consulting, and they have now delivered more than 40 projects and some 16 agencies across the public service, with a client satisfaction rate of 90 per cent. I don't think you'd find many people that, if they've outsourced to private consultants, have a satisfaction rate of 90 per cent. Maybe some would get that. They've done really important work in terms of making improvements in the trade and investment environment for Australian businesses, assisting with our household batteries program, something where this government is helping individuals have a little bit more say over their energy security by rolling out more than 500,000 community batteries. We anticipate that, when at full-scale, Australian Government Consulting will be able to deliver across the Public Service some 160 projects a year. We're really proud of that work.

Similarly, we're proud of the investments we've made in Australia's Public Service to make sure that Australians get the services they deserve. We put out, through Services Australia, some $260 billion of payments a year. Some 27.5 million Australians rely on Services Australia through Medicare. What we knew is we didn't have quite enough public servants doing that core work of public service, so we put more people in there to make sure we could get better services to the Australian people. Here are the results for the member where we've chosen to invest. Aged-care customer claims used to take 51 days, but, because we invested in public services and public servants, it's now down to just 14 days. That's people getting payments faster. We saw, when it came to paid parental leave, it was taking up to a month, 31 days, for people to get their paid parental leave claims. Now it's taking just six days because our government has chosen to invest in public services. We've also ensured that we can get our disaster recovery payments out faster, which, in the last financial year, affected some 735,000 people. I'd refer all honourable members to read all of the budget papers, but particularly that—about how the benefits of our investments have helped the Australian public get the public services they rightly deserve.

It's always a risk in this place when you say something like, 'Don't let politicians sell you fake solutions,' and I'd say to the Greens party, when it comes to fake solutions, if you want to set the bar a little higher for politics in the future, maybe don't preference One Nation in Western Australia. The Greens party at the last election had a real challenge. They couldn't bring themselves to put One Nation last in Bullwinkel. Even in Fremantle, the Greens party chose not to put One Nation last. I think we can set higher standards than that, and I encourage the member to show some leadership in her— (Time expired)

Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Perth for giving us some prescribed bedtime reading and pointing out that the honourable member who proposed this MPI spoke for only a short period—and that's because that is the way we do it over on the crossbench; we share our opportunities to speak. So I thank her for that opportunity.

Nationwide we rely on essential services such as health, utilities, banking and post in our day-to-day lives. They're not luxuries, but they allow us to live safely and they allow us to live with dignity. Unfortunately, the government doesn't always see these services as essential in the same way that I do and that rural and regional Australians do. Delivering essential services in regional Australia is more complex—it is—and more expensive than it is in major cities, and it requires different solutions. Populations are more dispersed. Services obviously must cover larger distances, often on poorly funded roads with poor telecommunications and no public transport. Too often, when funding and service delivery decisions are based on population or based on profits—because they have been put into the private sector—regional Australians miss out, time and time again. That burden falls hardest on older residents, on young families, on people with low incomes, on small businesses, on anyone for whom distance is truly a daily barrier.

Over recent decades Australia has embraced privatisation, and successive governments sold public utilities and corporatised key government services. It was wonderful to hear about the electricity services in WA—a great example; if only it wasn't exclusive to WA. Successive governments sold government enterprises to private markets, and they sold these decisions to us with claims of betterment: 'We're all going to be better off.' They claimed that competition would drive efficiency, improve quality and reduce costs. Well, many of us have been sold a pup on that one.

These market based models work best—if they work at all—where there's the population density to support competition, and in regional Australia these conditions rarely exist. For years, regional communities have watched services retreat. The NDIS, aged care and child care are dominated by private providers, but waitlists are long, if you can find a provider at all. It's the classic thin market problem. Post offices have closed, bank branches have completely disappeared in many communities, and it's hard to wind back the clock.

But government has a responsibility to step in where markets fail, because some services, whether publicly or privately owned and operated, are simply too important to be treated as optional, as a 'nice to have'. Services like banking and post are essential to the functioning of regional communities. They just are—whether it's a small business sending and receiving goods, a country footy club handling match-day takings or an older person who is not confident doing banking online. This is a matter of necessity. It's a matter of human rights and equity, not a matter of convenience.

Hundreds of towns that once had a bank now have none, and one third of regional bank branches closed in recent years. In my electorate, in places like Eildon and Taggerty, business owners are making 90-minute trips for routine banking. That means time away from their customers and time away from their employees. It's an absolute drain on their productivity. It's an additional cost at a time when rising costs are of paramount concern to all Australians.

That's why I'm so disappointed by the government's response to the 2024 inquiry into regional banking closures. It's one of the many things that reinforces the failures and the perceptions—the reality actually, because it's not a perception; it's a reality—that regional Australians are being left behind. After allowing the report to sit on the shelf for two years, the government failed to accept a key recommendation to recognise financial services as—guess what?—an essential service. This sends the wrong message that access to banking is optional, when it should be guaranteed. A better response would be seriously considering the inquiry's recommendation for a regional community banking branch program.

A community banking model has already proven its value in communities like Beechworth, Bright, Mount Beauty and Mansfield in my electorate, which have branches in which local people have ownership stakes, and profits are reinvested back into the community. These models are not private, not public; they demonstrate that commercial activity and community benefit go hand in hand. These are essential services: post offices, banks, health.

Jo Briskey (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Before entering this place, I worked closely with those in sectors and services that had been outsourced, where contracting companies were competing in a race to the bottom on wages and conditions. I fought alongside these workers—school cleaners and security guards—to help raise the standards and bring about the reversal of this outsourcing, to bring about the insourcing of these essential services.

Let's be clear about what privatisation can look like and those who are directly affected by it. There were school cleaning contracts in New South Wales under the former Liberal government there, where work plans gave one cleaner 10 minutes to clean 36 toilets. That's 17 seconds a toilet. The part I would ask this House to sit with is not that a company agreed to do it—of course they did—but that it was a Liberal government who allowed it to happen.

This is an example of outsourcing where not just the work went out the door but the duty of care went with it. One of the cleaners working under these contracts was a single mum who was doing 14 classrooms and six toilets on her own. She was putting in an unpaid hour every time because it was the only way to finish the job. When you write a price that low, you've already decided who is going to absorb it.

But whilst the member seeks to—I would argue—overpoliticise this issue, I'm proud to be a member of a government who has never been shy about public ownership. We legislated to keep the NBN in public hands when those opposite voted against it. We are building public early learning centres in the places the market has never bothered to go.

This is not the only way a government takes responsibility for these workers or services. The trouble with a motion that treats it as the only way is that it fails to recognise the role of good, responsible governments who act where we must and who partner when it is good to do so. I'm proud to be a member of a government that recognises when to invest more in the public service, when to invest in the public good and when to partner with the private sector for community benefit.

We should be clear that our government wants businesses to succeed and to succeed by competing fairly, innovating and delivering something worth buying, not by abusing market power and not by exploiting Australians. A company that wins a public contract by costing a toilet at 17 seconds to clean has not innovated anything; it has found someone they can underpay and has been rewarded for it.

There are areas where government has to lead, and there are areas where partnership with business can deliver real results. But partnership is not who you hire; it is what you require of them and what you are still answerable for after you have signed. Good governments do not withdraw from their responsibilities, and Labor has never withdrawn from ours, whether it be here in Canberra or across the country. And look at what is being delivered. In my community, aged-care workers have had the value of their work recognised, and this government has paid for it. Wage theft is now a crime because we made it so. Where Labor governments across the country have taken work back inhouse, cleaners have gone on long service leave that they never had in their working lives been entitled to.

Those are wage cases, public building, a law that did not exist until we made it so and work taken back inhouse across the country. People doing this work can't afford to wait for purity politics. Governments, businesses and workers each have a part to play. That is our position, and I would only add that the third one is the part that keeps getting left out of the sentence. In every contract I have described today, the worker was the part that was costed down. Our job is to set the rules, to protect the people relying on the service and to invest where the market will not. This government has done all three, and we've not let businesses off the hook—not at the check-out and not at the school gate.

Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

Essential services must serve the public first. Private involvement should only occur where there are clear public-interest tests, transparent KPIs, enforceable obligations and real accountability. Too often, governments have treated essential services as commercial transactions and assets and then see opportunities to sell off these assets to improve their bottom lines rather than focusing on the long-term public responsibility to ensure that they are there. Communities then pay the price through poorer services, less transparency and decisions driven by private return rather than public need, and the lesson is clear. Essential services and public assets must not be sold, outsourced or contracted away without clear and lasting public benefit and public interest tests.

Whilst I hear the member for Indi around the serious concerns and impact in regional Australia around essential services, it happens everywhere. Clear examples in Warringah we have under this government include the live issue of the proposed partial divestment of HMAS Penguin, a Defence asset, public land held on trust by Defence for the Australian people, not to be sold off to improve this government's bottom line. I don't support the partial divestment of this site. It continues to deliver critical Navy capability, including clearance diver training and underwater medicine. The community deserves transparency about what is proposed, what capabilities may be moved and what the true cost benefit assessment shows. HMAS Penguin is a public asset for public benefit. That means protecting the Angophora bushland, retaining public ownership wherever possible and, if existing buildings are released, prioritising genuine social affordable housing, not luxury apartments.

I've lodged Freedom of Information requests seeking that detail, but it's being objected to. The government cannot speak about rebuilding institutional trust while withholding environmental and cultural impact assessments under national security interest grounds. Worse still, they don't even look like they're undertaking such assessments until after the divestment of public land is announced.

Another example is the Northern Beaches Hospital. Northern Beaches Hospital was a project of the former New South Wales Liberal government's public-private agreement and completely failed to deliver the integrated, high-quality public healthcare our community was promised. For years patients, families and staff raised serious concerns about safety, standards, integration with the broader health system and working conditions, and this tragically had devastating consequences for some families. The New South Wales Auditor-General confirmed that many of the concerns and the commercial imperatives should never have come ahead of patient safety, clinical outcomes or staff wellbeing.

That's why the move to return the Northern Beaches Hospital to public ownership was so important. I acknowledge the strong advocacy of my independent colleagues at state government, Michael Regan, the member for Wakehurst, and Jacqui Scruby, the member for Pittwater, and the many community members who shared their difficult experiences. Public healthcare must be publicly accountable. Safe, high-quality healthcare should be designed around patients and staff, not around a private contract.

Finally, transport—our bus service again was privatised. We see the same problem there in Warringah. The privatisation of the Northern Beaches bus network has not delivered the reliable service our community needs. It's not about unfairly blaming individual operators or drivers. Keolis Downer is dealing with real workforce pressures including driver shortages, but this is an essential service. Public transport has been contracted out, and now we have a question around that accountability. The NSW Government must be accountable for that outcome.

Our community has dealt with cancelled services, unreliable timetables, road congestions, ageing infrastructure and limited public transport options for too long. We need more services, transport and drivers and a serious long-term plan to address the transport issues of the Northern Beaches. That includes workforce solutions to recruit and retain bus drivers and investment in road and public transport infrastructure, including upgrades identified through the Northern Beaches Network Review.

Now that's a whole other topic when you think of all the tunnels and the transport infrastructure that's occurring in the Sydney area which is all privatised and is causing major issues. I've written to the minister for immigration in this place to request a dedicated specialist visa pathway designed specifically for bus drivers to help fill some of the workforce shortages so we can have some semblance of public transport on the lower North Shore where we have no rail transport. Public transport is an essential infrastructure, and the public interest should be coming first.

The common thread is accountability. There has to be accountability and public interest, and they have to be put first where there is privatisation.

Zhi Soon (Banks, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Ryan has put forward this discussion about privatisation and how to protect the interests of Australian consumers, and it is an important issue. The success of Australia's economy has never come from government alone. As a modern advanced economy, we rely on the contributions from the private sector, government and our workforce to create outcomes. Neither governments nor the private sector can do everything alone. Even the father of classical economics, Adam Smith, recognised that there are several areas where it is inappropriate for control to be held by an individual or private interest, including infrastructure, education, justice and defence, amongst others.

At a fundamental level, the issue with many privatisation pushes is that they run contrary to the expectations of the majority of Australians about which services governments across the three levels ought to provide. It is important to recognise that privatisation should not be driven by an ideological fervour. When government pursues small government for small government's sake, it creates an environment where public interest is more likely to be lost.

We can observe this most clearly in some overseas jurisdictions. In parts of the UK, for example, the supply of water is almost entirely privatised, with government having the power to set overarching standards. This, unfortunately, has led to higher prices, consolidation and devastating environmental outcomes, with up to 83 per cent of English rivers showing evidence of pollution as a result of sewage and agricultural run-off.

There are also examples here at home. The privatisation of the Victorian state Electricity Commission in the 1990s led to higher prices for consumers and job losses that severely affected regional communities. The privatisation of ports in New South Wales has raised concerns about market power and protecting Australia's national interests.

Good governments do not obfuscate their responsibilities. Governments must work across the public and private sector to create new investment and new opportunities and to build a more productive economy that benefits everyone. We also need to recognise that there are things that government can learn from the private sector, but this does not mean that government lets the private sector have free rein.

One of the pitfalls of some privatisations is that instead of creating competition it entrenches monopolistic conditions in the marketplace. We want businesses to succeed, but we want them to do this by competing fairly, innovating, delivering for consumers and treating workers fairly and without abusing market power or exploiting communities.

Australians act responsibly and with integrity, and they expect big business to do the same. This government is doing the hard work to ensure that big business is not let off the hook for anti-competitive behaviour or breaches of public trust. This Labor government has worked hard to strengthen competition laws with new legislation to protect shoppers against price gouging at the supermarket as well as cracking down on unfair trading practices, increasing penalties for misconduct and introducing the Scams Prevention Framework.

When we talk about privatisations and the role of the private sector in service delivery, we also need to recognise that, too often, the justification for privatisation and outsourcing is created by cuts and neglect, driven over long periods of time, to our public services. When this Labor government came into office in 2022, we inherited a Public Service that had been hollowed out by a decade of outsourcing, cuts and underinvestment. It left key parts of our Public Service under-resourced, with a reduced capability, leading to longer wait times and poorer outcomes for Australians.

This government is making sure that we have a strong Public Service that is capable of delivering the public services we need while also recognising that we need to work across the economy to create growth opportunities and an economy that is more productive for everyone.

Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to take us back to the nineties, one of my favourite decades. Back in 1997, the Reserve Bank of Australia reported that increasing privatisation of the public sector was surpassing overseas trends. We had one of the larger privatisation programs in the OECD.

What we saw in that decade and the decade that followed was that, whether it was financial services, electricity, gas, transport or communication, all of them were privatised. They were government, they were Australian, they were national assets, and we privatised them, and we did that for a quick hit to the bottom line, to make it look like we were not in so much debt. But, ultimately, we've paid a bigger price for it since. I'm talking about Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, our state banks, our insurance offices and our airports. Our airports are privately owned. Everything has been sold off. In South Australia, we had the Electricity Trust of South Australia. If you needed a new connection, it was pretty reasonable to do; it was seen as a service delivered. Now it's all about profit.

The ETSA sale has been criticised by South Australians for many, many years because, after the privatisation, we saw high consumer prices, a loss of public revenue and, importantly, a loss of service delivery—so much so that, if you live in the regions, it's near impossible to get an electricity connection now. You try and work out some sort of convoluted way of having solar panels and this and that, and we just don't deliver those services that we used to.

Now I'd like to talk about employment services. When many of us in this place were young, we still had the CES; we had the Commonwealth Employment Service. Now—and successive governments have done this—we've put tender out to tender to ensure that employment services would fail. Ultimately, if you are a person who is long-term unemployed, your ability to connect into the employment market is very diminished. Why? That's because it's largely run now by—and the contracts are awarded to—for-profit companies. I think an American company had the biggest share in the last tender. What happens is that those companies are there to make a profit. They're not really there to service the individual or to service the community; they are there to make profit, and they're not ashamed to say that that's what they're there to do. What happens is that the individual misses out. So if you are a long-term unemployed person, the amount of service and support that you get to help you find a job, intensively working with you, is just not there, because they'll cherry-pick the people who are easiest to get in, the ones that they can very quickly get their return on investment on—because that's what it's all about. It's all about return on investment. It's not about delivering services for people.

Again, if I go back to the nineties and I think of the South Australian government back then, they were the largest employer of apprentices. They had refrigeration apprentices. They had carpenters. They put so many young people through apprenticeships. And we wonder now why we don't have enough people doing apprenticeships. It's because we've largely, as a state, offshored that and sent that over to the private sector, saying: 'Well, you can train the young people, not us. We as a state government will not do that.' And so we have seen a massive drop in ability for the public, for example in public works. No matter what it is, it's diminished us all. All we've done is an immediate sugar hit to the budget, but we have paid for this decision for decades to come. I truly believe in that, when you are delivering services to vulnerable people, whether in disability, aged care, people looking for work or prisons. I think the Northern Territory is organising to build a private prison; that's their next prison plan. Ultimately, the most vulnerable individual misses out. It's not good public policy when you're dealing with vulnerable people; services should be delivered by the state.

Claire Clutterham (Sturt, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The private sector is the engine room of our economy, and it supports the inclusive and sustainable productivity growth that is at the heart of our national agenda. It operates by promoting economic growth through investments, knowledge transfer and innovation. Without the private sector, new markets are not created, competition is not fostered and investments in critical national projects, perhaps through private equity or venture capital, are not made.

Further, data sourced from the World Bank tells us that the private sector is the source of nearly 90 per cent of the world's jobs. This means direct employment, the provision of finance to many industrial sectors and geographic regions, acting to boost living standards and improve the availability and quality of goods and services, such as housing, infrastructure, health and education, often through public-private partnerships that allow for risk sharing so governments and the Australian taxpayer do not have to shoulder all of the financial and operational risk. This risk-sharing approach is particularly relevant when it comes to critical infrastructure.

Equally, with its capacity to invest, innovate and commercialise, the private sector contributes environmentally friendly technologies which are valuable in the face of climate change and the transition to clean, renewable energy. This can positively impact many critical development goals, such as food security, health and water. Finally, the sector is also a reliable source of revenue for government operations through its contributions to taxes and royalties and its contribution to communities and social issues.

Australians care about whether we are creating secure jobs, building the industries of the future and ensuring essential services deliver for the communities that rely on them. That's why I don't accept the proposition that the answer to every challenge is simply more public ownership and less private investment. Australia's success has never been built on government alone or the private sector alone. It has been built on partnership. Government, of course, has a critical role to play. We invest in essential services. We build infrastructure. We support education, research and skills development. We provide the strategic leadership that helps Australia prepare for the future. But we also recognise that innovation, entrepreneurship and investment are often driven by businesses willing to take risks, develop new technologies and create new industries. So the question is not whether something is public or private; the question is whether it delivers outcomes that benefit Australians.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the defence and low-carbon liquid fuels industries. We can see that approach at work in my home state of South Australia. Firstly, private company HAMR Energy is making a substantial $800 million investment in a drop-in sustainable aviation fuel facility, supported by conditional funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. When successful, it will establish Australia's first large-scale methanol-to-jet sustainable aviation fuel refinery, helping strengthen fuel security, support regional forestry industries, create jobs and reduce emissions from aviation.

The lesson here is not that government should own the refinery, and it's not that government should simply step aside. The lesson is that government can help unlock investment, share risk and create the conditions for private capital to deliver public benefit. That is a practical, outcome focused approach.

We see the same principle in our growing defence industry. Anduril, the private developer of the incredible Ghost Shark capability, made a substantial investment into this product and into commercialising it for the Australian market. This has resulted in a clear execution of speed to capability of critical deterrence and surveillance equipment for the benefit of the security of the Australian people. The role of government is not necessarily to own this company. The role of government is to be an active partner, supporting research, developing skills, providing procurement pathways and giving innovative Australian industries the confidence to invest and grow by rewarding risk with contractual certainty.

Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

We've heard members mention in this House, for instance, NBN. As of June 2025, NBN's co-audit accounts show net liabilities of $4,309 million. They basically owe more than they own. The parliament has spent about $50 billion of taxpayers' money to buy it back and to rebuild it. Telstra went from a public telecommunications provider to a fully privatised company. The Commonwealth Bank was sold in three tranches and fully privatised by 1996. Across the states, electricity networks, gas pipelines and major ports were sold or leased. In New South Wales, families pay tolls on motorways that used to be part of the public road network. Every one of those sales came with the same promise: more competition, more efficiency and cheaper and better services for the public. But when I talk to my constituents in Fowler they don't talk about cheaper energy or transport. They talk about power bills that keep going up. They talk about paying tolls just to get to work or take the kids to school. They talk about struggling with large telecommunications and banking corporations when something goes wrong, feeling like a number in a queue rather than a customer with rights.

A constituent in Liverpool wrote to me recently. He lives alone in his own home, managing ongoing health challenges. He has almost no mobile phone reception in that home. He cannot reliably call his family, he cannot reliably ring his doctor and, if something goes wrong in the middle of the night, he cannot reliably call for an ambulance. This is not a remote area; this is Liverpool in the heart of south-west Sydney, in one of the fastest growing parts of this country and one of the most disadvantaged. The second story comes from Carramar, another suburb in my electorate of Fowler. I was doorknocking there recently, and residents told me that when flooding comes, they get cut off. The network is poor at the best of times. In a flash flood, when the water is rising and they need to call for help in an emergency, they cannot get through. These are not complaints about convenience. This is about whether someone can get help when their life depends on it.

We sold the national telecommunications carrier. We did not sell the responsibility that came with it. That responsibility still sits in this place. The safety net we built was designed around a land line on the wall. It was not designed for a country where the phone in your pocket is how you can call for help. I'm not standing here to say we're going to buy it all back. I'm realistic—those assets are gone, and those contracts run for decades. But I'm sure that there are lessons in this for us. You can sell the asset; you cannot sell the responsibility.

When the bill is too high, when the call does not connect, people do not ring a boardroom; they come to my office. I'm sure they come to many other members' offices as well. They sit in front of you, and they ask for help. They ask what are we going to do about it. That is where it lands. It lands with us, so let us protect what is left. That means a genuine public interest test, before any remaining public asset is sold or leased, measured against the people who will depend on it not just against the sale price. It means service obligations that reflect how people live today not how they lived 30 years ago. And it means real oversight and real consequences when providers let communities down, whether they are public or private, because when the lights go out and when the bills become unaffordable, people do not call the shareholders. When the water rises in Carramar, no-one rings a shareholder, they dial triple zero and hope it connects—and most of the time it doesn't. The government is still expected to deliver. If we are serious about the cost of living and serious about making sure no community is left behind, then we must be serious about who controls what we have left. We cannot afford to learn these lessons twice.

Matt Gregg (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Like the member for Fowler, I'm not recommending we go back to the 1990s. I don't think the Commonwealth government should be in the market for a copper network for telecommunications, buying back Telstra of old. I'd like to see cheese TV back, but that's not coming back either. Times have changed, and we must change with them. But we have learned from history, so the reacquisition of the NBN is a perfect lesson: we own a core piece of telecommunications infrastructure to ensure that there is access around the country and then allow a competitive market to operate where that is possible. That's because we know markets can't work everywhere either. You need to have effective competition. You need to have real choice among those who are deciding which product or service to acquire. You need to ensure that barriers to entry are appropriate and that the rules are fair. And you need to ensure the consumers aren't the ones who lose out at the end.

We've always had a blend in Australia of a strong private sector and a public sector that is dedicated to providing the services that we know the market alone, in pursuit of a buck, cannot provide, because that doesn't work in every area.

But we also believe, as, for example, through Medicare, that a blended approach is sometimes appropriate—that the state will fund an essential service but that there is a role for choice and differentiation as well so that people can choose a doctor of their own and then still pay for that service with their Medicare card. That involves both private and public sectors working together. We can be the market steward, getting involved where the market isn't able to achieve the desired goal, but, where the market is able in other areas, it can be involved. Again, it is a blended approach, and that works.

We're not members of the Bavarian communist party; we're here to make sure that the right services are available and that we're delivering them in the fairest, most effective and most efficient way possible. That will involve the private and public sectors. But, more importantly, it will involve the community sector, which has not been mentioned enough in this debate. Important legal and health services are provided by the not-for-profit sector, because they can use their place based services and apply local expertise and insights to deliver services that are right for those communities to deal with their specific needs, and I think proper credit needs to be given to them. Again, government can play a really important role as a partner, ensuring there is an appropriate service mix for those areas.

We know that competition alone won't do the trick. Having lived in the country for many years of my life, I can confirm that that is among the areas where we do need to have government heavily involved. At other times, we need to have universal access standards. We do that with telecommunications to ensure they're made available. If there are circumstances where that is failing, then we have to look at what appropriate interventions can be brought in. But the idea that we can suddenly go back to the 1990s is a Greens fever dream. It's not going to happen. It shouldn't happen.

We learn from our mistakes. Of course, this parliament didn't sell the state electricity commission. That was a state decision. In regard to Telstra's move, yes, we might look at history through a different lens now. But, at the same time, you wouldn't buy back Telstra now either. That would be a completely foolish move. There are opportunity costs with making all of these decisions. If we were to buy back every privatised asset in history—go back and get Qantas again; go and buy the Commonwealth Bank—we wouldn't be doing a lot more as a government, because that's going to cost a whole lot of the budget, plus more. We have to make sensible decisions in the world we actually live in, not the past that we reminisce about. We have to make sure that we make the most responsible decisions possible to ensure that Australians have the services they need and deserve.

Of course, on this side of the House, we realise the really important role of the Public Service. The nonsense economics that says you can just contract out and save money by adding the interested party from the shareholder or the partner is a dispelled myth. We know that having consultants do the job of APS employees is not a saving; it's a budget trick. In the longer term it is more expensive, and there are services that we can and need to deliver to ensure they're delivered by people whose job it is to focus on the public interest. That is central when we're delivering essential services, including social services, defence and in all those essential areas. As my colleague before alluded to, even Adam Smith recognised that there is a role for government to deliver some services sometimes.

So we've always got to strike a balance, but we also want to make sure that we have a dynamic economy and a private sector that works in the interests of the Australian people and of workers, and that means we must write the right rules for the game and make sure the settings are in place to have a dynamic and successful competitive market economy while, at the same time, we deliver a great standard of living for the Australian people, because that's what we're here to do. We're here to make life tomorrow better than it was yesterday, to constantly improve the lives of the Australian people and to make sure that the system is working for Australians so that they can raise a family, confident that their kids are going to have opportunities that they themselves did not have and that their parents could only dream of.

That means making the tough calls sometimes and making sure that we strike that balance, and that will always change, depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. So, no, we will not be going back and buying every single privatised asset, but we will always work in the interests of the Australian people.

Andrew Gee (Calare, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

This topic of public importance that we are discussing in this House today regarding public assets and the ownership of public assets is an important one. This afternoon I wish to speak about a really important public asset in the electorate of Calare: the Great Western Highway. As we know, the Great Western Highway has been closed for many months at a bridge called the Convict Bridge, which was built by a convict chain gang in 1832. Surprise, surprise—about 200 years later, that bridge failed. There is negligence on the part of successive governments over this closure and over the long-term failure to deliver genuine high-speed access between the Central West of New South Wales and Sydney.

As members of this House will know, for many months I have been advocating for federal funding for the fix on the Convict Bridge, for an ongoing business support package and also for a longer term solution for high-speed access in and out of the Central West. In fact, in question time today, I asked the Prime Minister if there would be federal funding for more lanes over the closed Convict Bridge on the Great Western Highway and an ongoing business support package, because we know that the pressure has been building on the state and federal governments over this issue.

I was very surprised this afternoon when local media outlets started contacting me with respect to a media alert for tomorrow, when apparently an announcement is going to take place at Mount Victoria—not in the Calare electorate but in the electorate of Macquarie—regarding the Great Western Highway. I have to tell you it is very troubling that so much time and effort and advocacy could go into an issue and the government could then rush out this announcement, whatever it is, straight after I've asked a question on this in question time. It defies belief. I would ask the government: where is the professional respect and courtesy over this?

Our electorate is being smashed to pieces by this closure. Our businesses are going broke. It's taking our kids hours to get to school. Yet, instead of engaging and telling us what's going on, you decide you're going to make an announcement through the media tomorrow. I find that very disappointing. Our communities are being put through hell because of this highway closure. I think the government is playing political games with it by holding back this announcement and just doing it in a Labor seat with only state and federal Labor members present. I think that that is pretty appalling. You well know the pain and suffering that our communities have been going through, yet you decide to rush out this announcement without one skerrick of consultation with the local members or with the communities who are living this. I think that's really poor form, and I would expect better from a government that has the means to actually help our communities, our businesses and also those people affected by the tens of thousands of extra traffic movements going through Lithgow that are making life hell.

Yes, you can sit there and heckle, but you have no idea. Come out and see it for yourself. It's all very well for you to sit there and make jokes about it, but that is disgraceful. The fact—

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Please direct your comments through the chair. Please stop interjecting. Let's try and have a respectful debate.

Andrew Gee (Calare, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

And show some professional respect and courtesy, not only in this House but with the announcements that you are planning to make.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

We're referring to me now.

Andrew Gee (Calare, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I find it appalling. It's a total disrespect to our communities and the pain that people are experiencing west of the Great Dividing Range. We see billions and billions of dollars being dropped on projects on the eastern side of the sandstone curtain, and all we get are empty words and small change. Let's hope tomorrow's announcement brings something meaningful.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The discussion has concluded.