Sue Lines (President) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKim has submitted a proposal, under standing order 75, shown at item 13 of today's Order of Business:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the government to finally 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.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

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

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

At the request of Senator McKim, I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the government to finally 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.

It feels like you can't leave the house these days without it costing you money. Why is life so expensive? One reason is that everything is being run by big corporations to prop up even bigger corporate profits. In years gone by, services were run for people. But over the last few decades, Labor and the Liberals have sold them off, meaning that we pay more and in most cases get less. Toll roads, airport parking, health insurance and medicine—they sold them. Electricity, airlines and ports were sold. Power stations and banks were sold too. Child care, employment services and railways—they sold them as well. All the things we need that used to be owned and run by the government have been sold to private corporations.

This huge sell off, this privatisation of our essential services, has been a very deliberate plan of both Labor and Liberal governments. When public services are run for the benefit of people, they're cheaper, better quality and create better-paying jobs. Instead, both these lots sold them. Now we all pay more, and we get lower quality services so that big corporations can make billions of dollars in profits. It's no wonder that people are fed up with politics. These services should be run for you and not run for corporate profits.

Some of the biggest companies on the Australian stock market are the ones that used to be owned by us—companies like Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank and Telstra. They're in private hands now, completely unaccountable. Labor and the Liberals have been selling off everything that isn't nailed down, and every time we've all ended up paying more for less. That's what we mean when we say the major parties are selling you out for corporate profit. It's not a slogan; it's who they're working for. Whether it's your gas and electricity, child care and aged care, your phone, your internet, the airport or the freeway—every time you use them, big corporations are making massive profits, and it's made life more expensive for all of us. Add to that the fact that one in three big corporations pays no tax, and that this government—and the last—are not fixing that, and it's a pretty clear picture that we're all being ripped off.

Public services should stay in public hands, run for people and not run for private profit. It's time that essential public services were returned to public ownership. If you don't want to feel like leaving the house means forking out money for nothing, then stop voting for the parties that are selling you out and start backing the people that are here fighting for you—and that's the Greens.

Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) | Link to this | Hansard source

It is very clear from this motion what the Greens want. They want to see bigger government. They want government in your lives every day, getting bigger and bigger. But it puzzles me that we have an urgency motion on this here in the Senate chamber today, because, under this Labor government, thanks to their reckless spending, we already have the biggest government on record—and that already comes at a high cost to Australians. The Greens are also concerned about worse services, but that is also what Australians are already seeing under this Labor government. The budget delivered back in May contained higher taxes for Australians, reduced support for older Australians, reduced support for veterans—the list goes on. In contrast, the coalition is focused on shaping a smaller government that delivers the essential services that Australians rely on, taking the pressure off inflation and interest rates, and restoring our living standards. We know that spending should be prudent and responsible, minimising the need to collect additional tax and to further burden Australian families and small businesses.

Under this Labor government, government spending has hit its highest point in four decades outside of the pandemic. That is the equivalent of every taxpayer having to pay $5,000 extra each and every year. Because of Labor's out-of-control spending, Australians are paying more for everything due to high inflation. Rising demand from government has reduced the labour and capital available for the private sector, leading to higher inflation and higher interest rates. Inflation today is higher in Australia than in every major advanced economy, and it has been well above the RBA's target band for the past 11 months—well before the conflict that broke out in Iran. This has resulted in interest rates today sitting at their highest level since 2011, under the former Labor government, after 15 interest rate rises. Roy Morgan measures that more than 1½ million households are suffering mortgage stress right now. Under Labor, our living standards have recorded the largest collapse in our history and in the developed world. This expansion of the government's share of the economy is also weighing on Australia's productivity. It is not a pretty picture.

To fund its spending addiction, this Labor government has increased taxes on families and small businesses, and it's hiding the true cost of its fiscal mismanagement by pushing more and more spending off-budget. But 'off-budget' simply means 'off the balance sheet'. The spending is still there and taxpayers are still paying for it. Labor's budget shows deep and deteriorating deficits totalling $150 billion over five years. On top of this, there is another $114 billion of hidden spending on the balance sheet, taking the real, deep structural deficits to well over $264 billion. This government was warned right back at the start of 2023 by the IMF that the proliferation of the federal government's so-called off-budget funds risked adding to inflation pressures.

What have Australians seen as a result of the billions spent on these funds? We've had reporting by the Financial Review that almost half of the $15 billion in the National Reconstruction Fund is now designed to bleed taxpayer cash with investments that do not clear the government's borrowing costs. The $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, at last count, has only completed 1,432 homes, and it's as clear as mud whether those completed homes were actually built or merely acquired. The HAFF is so bad that the ANAO has audited the scheme. It's also audited the management of the $20 billion Rewiring the Nation Fund.

Under the coalition's plan, we will end Labor's corporate welfare like the National Reconstruction Fund; end Labor's climate bureaucracy, including Rewiring the Nation; and end Labor's housing bureaucracy, namely their flagship Housing Australia Future Fund. Labor's failed attempts at public interventions into the private sector are highlighting exactly why we have to focus on the delivery of essential services. All of these funds, remember, were seeded with billions in borrowed money and Australians have the trillion dollars debt bomb, growing to $1.25 trillion, to show for it. When that happens, interest payments will hit more than $42 billion a year, or more than $80,000 a minute. The Greens talk of higher costs. Australians know they are already paying the higher costs of this government. They have the higher interest bill and the higher taxes to show for it.

Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator McKim for his motion, but this government is focused on delivering more real change—not arguing about how things are owned. From 1 July: lower taxes, higher pay, a fair go for all; another tax cut for every taxpayer—part of five rounds which will leave the average worker up to $2,800 a year better off. A new thousand-dollar instant tax deduction was introduced to deliver lower, simpler taxes for 6.2 million workers. Payday super began, increasing the retirement incomes of millions of Australians. Price gouging by supermarkets has been banned—thank God for that! Paid parental leave is expanded to a full six months. Around 2.6 million Australians have benefited from regular indexation of social security payment rates and thresholds. Medicare urgent care clinics have become a permanent part of Medicare. Record public hospital funding began flowing under a new five-year agreement with states and territories.

More broadly, we've done a heap to help with the cost of living. We have done cheaper child care for more than one million families; cheaper medicines, saving Australians $2.6 billion; three days of guaranteed subsidised early education for an additional 100,000 families; Free TAFE has 800,000 enrolments; the largest increase in rent assistance in 30 years; student debt relief for more than three million Australians; and more bulk-billing with an extra 1,400 GP clinics and 3,800 bulk-billing practices in total.

Yes, we can have a conversation about privatisation or public owned services, but what really matters is delivering for people. Any organisation can fail or have bad management, regardless of whether it's publicly or privately owned. Look no further than the useless attempts by the Tasmanian Liberal state government. After 12 years of useless government, Tasmanians are sick of the roundabout of neglect and then deflect. Only a Labor government will take public services seriously, and deliver these services properly, to deliver real change for Australians and Tasmanians.

Tasmanians are sick of being told by Liberal governments that they know how to run public assets, and then watching them prove the absolute opposite. Let's start with the TT-Line. That's a publicly owned company. Our ferries. Our port. What did the Tasmanian government do with it? They spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars building two new Spirit of Tasmania ferries—ferries that were too big for the berth Tasmania actually had ready for them. What galactically stupid failure! A $90 million upgrade turned into nearly $500 million. Those ships sat parked—one in Scotland, one in Geelong—burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars a month for a service Tasmanians couldn't even use. All up, they spent more than $700 million above what they told us it would cost. A deputy premier lost his job over it. That's not what public ownership failing looks like; that's what incompetence, wearing a public ownership costume, looks like.

Then there's TasInsure. The Liberals went to an election promising Tasmanians a real state owned insurer, something to actually take on a market that was taking the piss out of families and small businesses. They got elected on it. And then they quietly gutted it into a statutory authority that doesn't insure anyone. It just sits alongside the same insurers it was meant to challenge. Tasmania's public hospitals are also being crippled under the Liberal state government, despite the Labor federal government providing them with record funding. All the gear and no idea. Being told not to come to the LGH in Launnie because there are not enough beds—that isn't good enough.

Tasmanians are sick of their basic services not being up to scratch because of the state Liberals being useless at delivering. This isn't an argument against public ownership. Tasmanians still believe our ferries, our insurance, our essential services should belong to us, but you can't run public ownership on training wheels and thought bubbles. The state Liberal government is clearly not fit to run and look after Tasmanians. Let's stop flogging a dead horse. Give Tasmania a government that actually knows how to manage what it owns, because this Liberal state government has proven time and time again it can't. We need change. We need a Labor state government that values Tasmanians and delivers the public service that they deserve.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator McKim for this motion. The Greens have finally shown their true colours: 'Let's nationalise essential services.' From their website, those would include power, water, telecommunications, education, transport, health care and labs, which are industries that collectively hold $3 trillion in assets. No government could afford to pay just compensation at that price, which section 51 of our Constitution requires. Any attempt to nationalise these industries will fail on that basis. Greens party policy calls for a national chain of government owned supermarkets, so perhaps add a few hundred billion dollars more for those.

Actually, let me pause and focus on a government owned supermarket in the hands of the Greens for a moment. What would it look like? No plastic packaging, of course—former senator Whish-Wilson's contribution—in fact, very little packaging at all. Customers would need to bring their own bags and scoop out their purchases, just like in The Handmaid's Tale. When a new shipment arrives, Aboriginal Australians would shop first, then migrants with brown skin—Senator Faruqi's description, not mine—then gay and bi folk, then men dressed as women, followed by actual women, and then straight white men last, if anything is left.

Brown onions are available; white onions, not so much. Staff can be organised by hair colour: green hair in produce; blue hair in cleaning goods, just like toilet ducks; and red hair in hot food. Pricing is based on genetics. Please share your Ancestry DNA results in order for us to decide how much loading you will be charged for your white privilege. Staff dress is strictly pants and shirts for the women and skirts and blouses for the men. The Greens have of course built their supermarkets without walls, so the checkouts aren't very busy. Following World Economic Forum guidelines, meat is restricted to one lamb chop per week or one cockroach per week, and shopping trips are limited to one visit per person per week.

I'm glad the Greens can see the sense of humour. The bags of coal on display are empty and make fart noises when you touch them. Stores are now only open every Friday morning because staffing has been affected by the Greens' four-day working week and working from home, plus leave for maternity, paternity, sickness, bereavement, bad periods, stress, gender reassignment, domestic violence, study, union meetings and, of course, annual leave from having leave. I'm pretty sure I missed a few there!

The Greens' economic justice policy calls for the nationalisation of all natural monopolies and essential public services, which reflects the wording in Senator McKim's motion. Natural monopolies include water, rail, roads, sewerage and electricity, so I'm really not exaggerating my comments here at all. To be conducted under government ownership is property development and housing—but not all of it, since paying for $11 trillion in real estate might tire out their magic money fairy.

In other words, this motion is a Greens wet dream—total power and control in the hands of a government that will then make decisions based on victimhood and feelings. If this sounds like I'm having a lend, I'm having no more of a lend than the Greens and Minister Bowen have been taking at the taxpayer's expense in the name of saving the world from the sky god of warming. The government's attempt to effectively nationalise the power market to promote so-called renewables has resulted in a bill of hundreds of billions of dollars. It has shown the sheer incompetence of government when asked to perform tasks which are best left to the private sector.

Let's be clear. One Nation is not opposed to government-private partnerships which are part of our energy policy. We believe, though, that some infrastructure, including rail, should be publicly owned. Banking must have a government owned bank to provide a fair go for everyday Australians, which our banks stopped doing years ago.

Just one out of others. The real reason for the motion is simple: the Liberals moved to the left, and the Nationals followed them. Labor moved further to the left, and the Greens move so far left they're sitting in totalitarian territory. One Nation opposes this motion.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I call Senator Shoebridge, I've counted three terms about body parts and body motions already in this debate. I remind senators to think carefully about the language choices they make that bring respect and order to the Senate rather than descend into inappropriate language that I think is less than satisfactory for this place. I look forward to your contribution, Senator Shoebridge.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed; thank you, Acting Deputy President O'Neill. The Labor Party has joined with the coalition to flog off public assets for decades. Do you know what happens to Australians when politicians sell off publicly owned assets? They end up paying more. Over the past 20 years, Australians have been paying more and more for the things the public used to own. You can track this stuff over time.

In the last 20 years, after states privatised their electricity generators, their grids and their electricity and gas retailers, gas and electricity prices have gone up on average 5.8 per cent a year. The last few decades have seen public money ripped out of universities and replaced with HECS and other private fees, and surprise, surprise the cost of going to university has gone up 5.2 per cent a year. It's the same with insurance. Having flogged off all the public insurers, like GIO, the cost of insurance has gone up 5.3 per cent a year over the last two decades. While 5.8 per cent a year may not seem like much over one year, do that over two decades—make it cumulative—and the costs balloon.

At the same time, the average price for everything else that hasn't been privatised grew by just 2.8 per cent a year, which is barely half. This has been a project designed to line the pockets of big corporations and make you pay for it, and it's working, at least, for big corporations and their billionaire owners. We've all seen MPs from Labor, One Nation and the coalition crying their crocodile tears over the cost of living, with people paying more and more for basic things like energy, transport, banking and insurance. But listen here today. It's those very same MPs who made it this way. All of you lot sold off our public assets, then you sat back and watched while big corporations made bank and now you're pretending to care.

The public used to own Telstra. Now, more than two decades on from that fire sale, we regularly see massive outages that threaten lives and huge parts of the country struggling to have enough reception to send or get a text, and the costs for your phone bill keep going up. Yet the CEO of privatised Telstra—privatised by Labor—saw fit to have an 11 per cent pay rise to $7 million a year, and the company made a neat $2.4 million in profit in the last financial year. If it were publicly owned, that profit could've been used to fund hospitals and schools. Now that Telstra is privately owned it funds private jets and champagne, and some crumbs fall into the pockets of Labor and the coalition as political donations to keep the whole boondoggle running.

The people of Australia used to own Qantas. Labor sold it off. We now see it screwing unfair profits by selling tickets for ghost flights and illegally sacking 2,000 workers. All the while the CEO that left in disgrace in 2023 was still getting $3.8 million in shares as a bonus in 2025, which is two years after he left. You'd almost think that this mob and their paid-up supporters in here had rigged the system. The public used to own the Commonwealth Bank, the state insurance companies and our airports. They were all sold by you lot. That's why parking costs a hundred bucks at the airport, why you can't afford to insure your car and why more and more of your pay packet is sucked up to feed the multibillion-dollar profits of the Commonwealth Bank and others.

Privatisation is fuelling wealth inequality, driving up inflation and supercharging the cost of living, and it's a rort. Labor looked at public goods that served the people—not profit—and they ripped them away from you to give to their ultrawealthy donors and mates. And it's continuing to happen today. They just can't help themselves. The Albanese government is currently flogging off public land in cities as part of its Defence estate audit. Labor in Victoria is eyeing how they can privatise Melbourne's water system. Whenever it's a choice between the community deciding what to do with public assets and pocketing some quick cash from their developer mates or vampire investors, Labor will always take the money and they'll be cheered on by One Nation and the coalition.

If you think these are the people who will take on big tech, I've got a data centre shaped bridge to sell you. If you want public control over AI, public services owned by the public and a system that puts you before corporate profits then we need to throw this lot out—all of them—because, despite how much they pretend to be different, they're all funded by the same corporate paymasters and they all deliver the same mush. Watch their votes today; watch them today. The Greens will be on one side, and the rest of this lot will be lined up over there, with their mates Alan Joyce and Gina Rinehart.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians are paying the price of privatisation. We're paying the price in aged care, in the NDIS, in employment services, in health care, in our electricity, in our telecommunications and even in our travel. Across every possible industry, privatisation is slamming Australians with price increase after price increase. Right now, private corporations are scheming in their boardrooms to invent new costs to levy on us. We've just seen this with Jetstar charging people to put their bag in an overhead locker on the plane. This is supposed to be our budget airline. That is not to mention that Jetstar is owned by Qantas, which used to be publicly owned before a Labor government sold it.

Likewise, in Queensland, we're told to go on to the Energy Made Easy website to swim through the hundreds of private retailers and their various deals. We select one knowing that, no matter who we go with, whether it's origin or AGL or Alinta or any other, we'll just get hit with another price increase in 12 months anyway. That's a direct result of the privatisation of Queensland's electricity retail, again, brought to you by a Labor government.

Why is the onus on Australians to shop around? Why is there no onus on private corporations to stop price gouging us? Why is there no genuine public alternative for Australians who are sick of being taken for a ride? What else will private corporations start charging for that used to be free? What other public service can they swindle out of Labor to now start delivering for profit at exorbitant rates?

Electricity is an essential service, especially in Queensland and in the other parts of northern Australia. When summer comes, it is becoming more and more life threatening to go without adequate cooling in your home. Summers are getting warmer, and our bills are going up, much to the delight of the profits of private electricity retailers. The Greens want to put an end to the rort of privatisation in this country. We believe that essential services should be run as a public good and not by for-profit corporations who donate to everyone in here.

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

Labor and Liberal governments have bent the knee to billionaires and corporations for far too long. In exchange for millions in donations and cushy jobs, the political establishment has flogged off essential public services for the benefits of CEOs, investment bankers and private equity ghouls. This has been going on for decades. It's why every grocery bill, rent repayment and power bill feels like a punch to the guts. It's why life keeps getting harder while the banks, telcos and health providers that used to be owned by the public are making massive profits for their corporate owners.

Letting capitalism destroy essential services hasn't just hurt our household budgets. It has killed people. We all want the best care for our loved ones. We want to know they are safe and happy when we can't be with them, but, from child care to aged care, we've seen the neglect and abuse that happens when you put profit over people—corners cut, safety undermined and workers underpaid and undervalued. Small tweaks won't fix the broken system that's harming our kids and our parents. Occasional fines and public shaming won't change the behaviour of soulless businessmen who know their bonuses are on the way. We have to threaten their business models by giving ordinary people real alternatives owned by the people and run for good, not for profit.

Here's what I think: a government without a plan for public ownership and nationalisation is one that doesn't deserve to govern. That's the test the Albanese government has failed. The Greens won't have it. We are bringing public services back into public hands where they belong.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

There was a time when governments understood their job and who they are here to serve. They built homes. They built and ran electricity-generation assets and poles and wires networks. They owned banks. They owned insurers. They owned airlines. They built the roads. They built the railways. They built the ports. They built the infrastructure that was actually a significant part of building this country. They did it because there are some things that are too important to be built and run for profit.

Then, after that, came the great sell-off: Labor governments and coalition governments privatising public assets built with the blood, sweat and tears of everyday Australians. They were selling them off for profit, handing them over, often at bargain basement prices, to corporations so the profits could flow into the private sector. Australians were promised that, through privatisation, they would get lower prices, they would get better services, and they would get greater efficiencies. But what did they actually get? They got higher bills. They got higher tolls. They got higher fees, worse services, insecure jobs and call centres no-one can reach. Executives were paid multimillion-dollar annual salaries while ordinary people paid the price through increases in their bills.

The privatisation experiment has been an unmitigated disaster. They took that assets that we collectively built, that we collectively paid for and that we collectively owned and ran, and they turned them into machines for extracting profit from all of us. The consequences are everywhere you look. Governments now pretend they're powerless to fix the problems that they created by selling off public assets. They outsource responsibility. They hire more consultants from the private sector to try and tell them what to do. They subsidise corporations and then they shrug when costs keep going up and the standard of services keeps declining. We need to take back what we built, and we need to take back what we used to own.

Most of all, we need a government with the courage and the capacity to govern because this country was built by the Australian people on the basis of this land that was stolen from First Nations people, and we need to make reparation for that. (Time expired)

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion moved by Senator Waters be agreed to.