The 5% Club moves in on NSW public schools.

NSW Labor caves in on PPPs

School management is to be privatised, reports Fay Gervasoni.

Privatisation's third wave hits NSW

By Fay Gervasoni

In a major win for the national and international privatisation lobby, nine new public schools in NSW are to be built and managed by private firms.

According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, NSW Treasurer Michael Egan claims that the $133 million deal will be $8 million cheaper than public management, or represent a saving of 4 per cent. No details were reported on how the calculation was made.

The Evatt Foundation has published many articles and critiques on PPPs, which were invented by Tony Blair's UK government. Major concerns include: the methods used for calculating the public cost of capital and for allocating and privatising risks; the off-balance sheet nature of the deals; the monopoly-monopsony relations between the government and the firms; the new political and technical risks that the deals create; the implications for labour; the long-term costs; and the lack of accountability and transparency.

With repect to Michael Egan's nine privatised schools, the immediate question is not whether the public will ever see the full details of the contracts: we know they never will. The crucial question is whether the the NSW Auditor-general will ever see the FULL contracts. In a stance repugnant to democratic accountability, no such commitment exists under the NSW government's PPP policy.

More broadly, as the Australian Auditor-General has recently observed about 'core' services:

Outsourcing and privatising areas traditionally considered public sector activities indicates that the size of the core is shrinking. A broader issue is whether, over the longer term, the public sector might diminish to a point at which it no longer constitutes a credible, effective or viable arm of sound governance.

Following are the resources on PPPs on the Evatt site:

• Do as we say, not as we do, by George Monbiot
• Partnerships, privatisation & the public interest, by John Spoehr
• PPPs & public schools, by the NSW Teachers Federation
• Politics & the English Language, by George Orwell
• 'The bully's pulpit' & 'Sums starting to dig in', by Paul Krugman & John Quiggin, respectively
• The trouble with PPPs: An un-holy alliance, by Christopher Sheil
• The public good & public services: What role for the public sector? by David Hayward
• There are other ways: PPPs & public policy, by Sharan Burrow
• News of the world: PPPs are a disaster, By Kenneth Davidson
• Public fraud initiative, by George Monbiot
• PPPs: A policy in search of a rationale? Private finance and 'value for money' in Britain's public hospitals, by Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul & Neil Vickers
• PPPs: Beneath the rhetoric, by John Quiggin & Christopher Sheil

And there are some responses on the Evatt Letters page:

• The worm of wedge politics has crawled through many gutters, writes Steven Presley
• The next great privatisation debate, writes Geoff Lazarus
• A misleading and coercive reform, writes Athena Vongalis

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