A virtual open slather for privatisation

Evatt Seminar on PPPs

They must be joking, says Christopher Sheil.

The trouble with PPPs

By Christopher Sheil

The first thing anyone can notice about so-called 'public-private partnerships' - or 'PPPs' - is that the subject presents itself as both exceedingly complicated and very boring; so complicated and boring that even editors with the Australian Financial Review have complained to me at times about being 'PPPed out'.

Indeed, the topic can be so complicated and boring that one suspects this is a deliberate part of the political marketing strategy adopted by the advocates of these policies. If the editors of the Fin find the topic tedious, what hope can critics have of raising public awareness and debate about this direction?

Let me try to cut through some of the complexity, even if I cannot promise to be entertaining. Actually, when preparing this paper I spent some time searching cyberspace for some jokes about PPPs, without any luck. I naturally thought this was because the topic is so dry and complex that it simply doesn't allow for humour. But, on second thought, it occurred that the reason no one bothers to think up jokes about PPPs is because the policy-makers have already done the job for us.

The first joke in all the policy papers that have been released by our State Labor governments is an insistence that PPPs are not privatisation. The Western Australian PPP paper, for example, states in the opening paragraph of its introduction that the government 'has a clear policy position that it does not support privatisation'. Likewise, the NSW document says that the policy 'does not mean privatisation of public services'.

These statements must be a joke, because all the papers are all about, and all of them are only about, privatisation.

No, this does not mean that the policies are about 'privatisation by stealth' - the promoters of these policies don't really mind them being described as 'privatisation by stealth', since it helps them to keep up their running joke, which is that these policies are not about privatisation, pure and simple.

Let me insist, and we all should insist, that they are about privatisation, no more no less.

This point must be hammered. A close reading of the PPP policy documents reveals that the only public activities that they all exclude from privatisation are school teaching and clinical services within hospitals. Mind you, the schools and hospitals can be privatised, but the governments have generally promised that they will still continue to employ the teachers, doctors and nurses who work in them.

Some governments have gone a little further. The Victorian government has also ruled out privatising the judges within the court system, as has the Western Australian government, which has also ruled out privatising the police and 'offender management'.

This then is the first important point to be made. Read at their widest, the policies that have been represented as PPPs amount to a New Right Utopia.

There is no barrier within these policy papers that can prevent State governments being reduced to the point where they own nothing, and their sole direct tasks will be teaching school children and tending the sick. In Victoria and Western Australia, they will also continue to employ our judges. Bravely, Western Australia also promises to continue to employ police and manage 'offenders'.

Let's be clear: these policy papers supply no other limits. Beyond these slender commitments, PPPs amount to open slather for privatisation.

I lie. The truth is that the policies don't even supply these slender limits.

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