Graham, as a spin doctor you get F for fail!
One remembers the absolute rout the became the guaranteed result for Captain Bligh, when she sold some public assets, and had a few more earmarked for sale, should she be returned!
Labor went from a nice healthy margin to almost complete irrelevance.
And now the only thing that gives them any prospect whatsoever, of a return to the treasury benches, is their current stand against privatization, by any name!
One remembers the outcome of the privatization of Queensland gas; a 400% increase in prices in just weeks.
This sort of muddle headed thinking is entirely illogical!
One sells the asset, usually to a debt laden foreigner, who apart from paying little or no tax, obliges Joe public to pay a premium, in order to one, service the new foreign debt, and the higher profit demands!
The voters out there in mugsville, particularly small business, can then be held to energy ransom!
One of the core responsibilities of Government, was to supply all cash cow essential service; and when they last did, small operators could make a REASONABLE profit!
Now all they seem to do is carry the landlord, as unpaid tax collectors!
It's time we replaced this risible rubbish with some Lee Kwan Yu style pragmatism!
Least we make his predictions a self fulfilling prophecy!
All we need is competent managers at the helm; and sadly, that used to be the coalition!
And virtually the only ones able to not only live within a budget, but run surplus after surplus.
Almost everything has gone downhill since wrong headed power hungry ideologues; heritage listed a clearly dying Great Barrier Reef.
Should that be reversed, by an AWOL captain courageous; there is likely a huge bonanza, that if developed in public hands, (HERESY) provide all the revenue, Q'ld and indeed the country could need, for decades!
Privatization is not the answer, but the very opposite, supported by contract labor hire/management (three year terms) tendering, may very well be!
TIMIDITY IS NOT AN OPTION! NOR ARE BLINKERED IDEOLOGUES!
Rhrosty.

I would love to see examples of privatisation pushing costs down,can I have an example from each state please

The author fails to discuss or even disclose the substantial difference between the situation that exists for a Sovereign (currency issuing) Government and a financially subservient state such as every state in Australia and the USA and all those European countries now dependent on the Euro.

Privatisation only makes sense if the SG is so incompetent that it cannot set up an independent supervision system for an asset it owns. I very much doubt that that independent supervision was deficient the case with any of the sold assets such as Qantas, the CBA and Telstra etc. Had Telstra not been sold, citizens would have had at least fibre to the node ten or more years ago. The CBA had been keeping its foot on the the ability of the other private banks to gouge their customers for years.

Menzies at least had the sense to apply strong regulation to the banks after he won power on the basis of no petrol rationing or bank nationalisation. The sorry state of airlines worldwide shows that that industry does not run well anywhere where the government does not have a significant input.

What will happen with the $5B from the sale of Medibank? Nothing that could not have been achieved by other appropriate means. The SG could have asked the Reserve Bank for the money. The SG deficit in this country is not the main economic problem. In about 2000, a senior economist in the UK Treasury Wynne Godley, was adamant that the private sector cannot continually operate with a deficit. that will be the situation when the Current Account (foreign trade and capital flow) deficit is greater than the SG deficit.

The principal problem is the Current Account deficit. Yet we are doing almost nothing to rectify that problem. We need to take a leaf out of Norway's book in that regard.

The blog articles from the University of Missouri, Kansas City has some excellent material that shows just how wrong the race toward austerity and privatisation is, as does Professor Mariana Mazzucato at the University of Sussex.

America privatised pretty much everything, and promptly lost her middle class. Following their lead, public schools are being privatised as we speak, Medibank Private is up for grabs, public hospitals will soon follow and the list goes on. Is this really where we want to go?
But this argument may soon be moot anyway. How much of it will look like yesterday's lunch once the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement is signed? While no one is saying much of anything other than trust me, I'm a politician, isn't one of the defining lines in the TPPA a prohibition on national governments passing legislation that would impact negatively on the ability of a multi-national corporation to turn a profit?
"We can't turn a profit if we don't own it." Will that argument be used?
And what about award rates? It wouldn't take brilliance to argue that wages high enough to support a middle class impact negatively on a corporation's ability to turn a profit.
Government by the people for the people. That's not a bad line, but to have any teeth, the members of the government in question will have to be able to do more than take direction from board rooms.

Hello Graham,
I oppose selling state assets.
Governments only spend money that they firstly take from someone else (usually taxpayers).
Every dollar they no longer get from these businesses they now have to get from us.
Although sometimes market conditions and poor business models dictate that some of these businesses arent very profitable, it's my opinion that the running of the country is the most important business in the country, and if the governments cant find a way to make these businesses run profitably, then it's evidence that the acting governments are incompetent in the bigger business of running the country.

Telstra announced a full year profit of 4.3billion.
We've never had a surplus like that.
Our countries total debt is over 600bn.
How are we ever going to pay that back when we cant even get a lousy surplus at all?
We'll never pay it back, and eventually end up like Greece or the Ukraine.

I don't agree with these stupid comparisons that compare debt to GDP.
I believe that if its not in your wallet you cant afford it.

I remember when John Howard made us all think he'd given us a surplus, but did not set money aside for government superannuation.
Alarm bells were ringing for me back then, dirty accounting lies.
I remember when Anna Blight tried to tell us that regular people borrow money to build a home as her justification to borrow more money. - Stupid.

You talk about the assets Queensland wants to privatise only earning 3% and that term deposits could be earning 4%. Considering that idea is just foolish nonsense considering we have another looming GFC with the US dollar about to implode. Better to buy gold or silver if anything. And not to mention the government has signed on to Bail-in powers with the G20 group of countries so if anything happens in the global economy we may as well have sold these assets and flushed the money straight down the toilet. - to save the banks...

Now they talk about things like Debt tax.
Its a bit late now.

I agree with most of the points previous commenters have made.

Essentially privatisation is a method of transferring public assets into the hands of supporters of the Liberal party that's 'justified' by neo-liberal ideology which theorises that foreign oligopolies or monopolies are superior to publicly owned enterprises and the government is just another business.