Brad, your article should, at the outset, have mentioned your own pecuniary interest in PPP's. Excessive profits at the expense of taxpayers is justifiable.

In my view, as an employee in the public suctor, it's a no brainer that the funding costs of Treasury bonds will always be significantly cheaper than PPP funding, particularly after the GFC.

As for superior project management in the Private Sector, you may have a case. That can be tested in competitive tendering. There will be no shortage of work for private contractors after the floods.

PPPs are necessary but neither Infrastructure Australia nor state governments have set the framework for appropriate risk/reward balances and both public benefit and investor security. The WSROC report did not address this. Superannuants will not want their money squandered; and taxpayers will not want to carry the liability for "guaranteed" investments which fail. Australia needs open, network-based analyses, not project-by-project "commercial in confidence" bids by confidence tricksters. Sydney's metros, trams and freeways are largely in this category but Campbell Newman has had his problems and the Gold Coast rapid transit is a heavily-subsidised toy.

To maximize their chances of remaining in office, bourgeois politicians strive for an “investment friendly” environment, for “partnerships” between government and business. And because there is a regular competition for office between parliamentary
parties there is also competition for the endorsement of the business community through the monopoly capitalist media.

Hence, the interests of governments, both state and Federal, and of whatever political complexion, are tied to the need to provide the most profitable opportunities, and most inexpensive services, to the monopolies. In this sense, the provision of PPP opportunities to private sector investors has become unavoidable for parties in office.

In relation to the private sector, it is a given of capitalist economics that the profit motive is at the heart of all economic activity. Not even the most reactionary apologist for capitalism would try to deny the primacy of the profit motive for the private sector. Private capital must seek to constantly recreate and increase its own value, but it operates in a world of finite opportunities for doing so.

Hence there is the compulsion to export capital from the most heavily industrialised (imperialist) nations to those areas abroad where labour costs are lower and raw materials cheaper. Whole industries are exported in the search for lower costs and higher profits. But even this has limits to it, and compliant governments in the major capitalist countries have looked in recent times to creating opportunities for investment in their own infrastructure projects in order to open up newer sources of profit for the big monopoly companies. Thus, there is a community of interests between governments and capitalists that has led to the PPP phenomenon.

And the question to be answered now is whether this is in the interests of the community or whether it is merely a new form of crony capitalism.

We got along without PPPs for a long time, and there's no reason we can't again.

Two things drove the fad for PPPs. One, the ideology that claims private is always better than public. There was never a shred of evidence for that. Two, governments realised they could avoid raising taxes, by hiding the charges in another form.

In doing so, governments simply abdicated their responsibility - to provide infrastructure, to give the public the best value for their money. The most objectionable aspect of PPPs is the excuse they provide for hiding the public's business by claiming it is proprietary information. It's our business - if any company wants to participate it should be on the basis of full transparency, so we know how our business is being conducted.

I totally disagree with Geoff Davies.PPP,s are nothing more than rape the public purse.The reason why we don't have enough money for infrastucture and services is that the new money to equal our increases in GDP is created as debt by private banks when in fact it should be created as a tax credit.

Who owns the increases in our GDP? Those who create this new money in their computers throught the frtactional reserve systemm of banking.

I will gladly debate anyone anytime on this most crucial issue.You cannot solve a debt problem by creating more debt.

Are you ready Geoff Davies?

Governments have had their fingers burned more than once by PPP's. But then our politicans get a handsome taxpayer funded welfare after they bleed the public purse into the hands of CEO's many of who would seem display sociopathic traits.