You have no idea do you JF Aus.

To start with our neighbourhood watch area has 880 homes & growing. No more than 20 are commercial farms, just acreage living lifestyle blocks, with many amateur equestrian people. There is no town water, every one of them supply their own water, & there is no tax deductibility involved.

Those further out who farm, contributed to a rural water scheme, & spent big dollars up front. They have between $25,000 & $60,000 annual bill for maintained of the damn & infrastructure, to be in the scheme, plus a charge per megalitre for the water they draw.

A few years back, when it was dry, that bastard of a man Beattie took the water from their dam to supply Swanbank Power Station, leaving them with no water at all for 2 years, but they still had to pay the infrastructures maintenance. Any form of tax deductibility is pretty useless when you have no production, no income, so no tax.

I might mention that in 2 recent years, when we had too much rain, also reducing production, they drew no water, but they still had to pay that infrastructure cost.

Our local council, & most country councils, have spent heaps on water infrastructure for the towns folk, most of which the residents pay in rates & water rates. It is only the city folk who have the major investment in dams picked up by the state government.

Continued

Continued

Beattie spent billions on pipe infrastructure to pinch country & Gold Coast water for Brisbane in the drought. Water in the Gold Coast damn, built by Gold Coast council funds could be pumped to Brisbane. After a rate payer paid for raising of their damn, they had extra capacity when Wivenhoe was being reduced for safety.

Don't waste all that water said the Gold Coast, send it down here, to fill our 40% increase in capacity. Guess what, the multi billion pipes can't work that way. They can't pump to the Gold Coast, only away from it to Brisbane.

And you people wonder why many of us don't have much time for whining city folk. Yes their water rates have skyrocketed, but that is because they had that Idiot Beattie, followed by Bligh. They panicked & spent billions on a white elephant desalination plant & piping system.

All of the comments so far, while all insightful and knowledgeable in terms of their practical application, overlook the real underlying issue.

The fact is that, had Australia not gone down the privatisation road, it would have become a pariah in the international financial community. Those who refuse to participate in the international financial consensus are punished, through a variety of measures - low credit ratings, isolation from trade pacts, enforcement of trade and economic sanctions, media demonization, political ostracism and, in extreme cases, destabilisation, proxy civil wars and bombing.

The enforced demise of the Whitlam government - the last publically responsible of Australia's economic administrations (despite enduring Murdoch propaganda that it was wasteful and profligate) - was the final death knell to Australia's public ownership of national assets.

Despite the overwhelming evidence that privatisation offers absolutely nothing to ordinary citizens, and simply transfers wealth to an increasingly corrupt private sector, nothing is going to change.

Privatisation is now a sacred religion. For any politician to challenge it is to invite career suicide and instant social exclusion (worse than death for politicians, who are by nature pathetically conformist establishment players).

The best we can hope for is for the system to play itself out until it totally collapses under its own corruption and excess. But whatever comes after offers little hope of a happy ending.

Posted by Hasbeen, Sunday, 2 November 2014 10:19:45 PM

Sorry to hear about your loss and your experience. It sounds like your grief is still pretty raw.

If you continued to read my post, I also said that neglect can and does happen in the Public institutions as well.

A prime example of good privatisation is the sale of electricity generation in Victoria who now has the lowest bulk price of power in the country.

Similarly, the sale of medibank in a mature market will put about $5bn in the government's pockets for further infrastructure growth, and continue providing company and individual tax revenue with no price increases.

Thanks for your condolences Wolly. Yes I am a bit raw & sensitive about it.