Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

An absolute shame! My colleague here is absolutely right. I don't even know if there are words to describe what is happening in that privatised sector. That is what happens when successive governments stop believing in the public good and start worshipping at the altar of the market.

And it continues. The Albanese government is dressing up privatisation with buzzwords like 'co-investment'; and 'public-private partnerships' has been used for a long time. Sometimes the language changes, but it is the same disease and the same trajectory: hollow out the public sector, outsource accountability and let corporations run the show while everyday people pay the price every single day. Labor says it stands for working people. I don't think anyone believes that, because working people cannot afford their power bills, cannot afford to pay their HECS debts, cannot afford a home and now cannot even reach emergency services when they need them most. Decades of privatisation have left ordinary people paying more for less while governments wash their hands of the disasters that inevitably follow.

I think this should be a real wake-up call for the Labor government to say, 'Enough!' The privatisation experiment has failed, and we must have the courage to end it. We cannot tinker around the edges. We cannot create more toothless, underfunded regulators or positions. We cannot pretend that small changes will fix a crisis. We cannot pretend that for the climate. We cannot pretend that for any other public services. We need to rebuild public ownership. We need to bring back public accountability. We need to invest in the people and the systems that keep our country fair and safe. We need to put public interest above private profit and make sure that a company like Optus can never hold our lives in its hands, because, when a mother cannot reach triple 0 and her new baby dies, we know the system has utterly failed. Privatisation is not delivering efficiency; it is delivering neglect, it is delivering cruelty, and the disaster has been built, brick by brick, by decades of political cowardice by governments. So today I say to the government: stop selling us out. Let's end the neoliberal experiment. Essential services must be in public hands for the public good.

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