"Privatisation is not just good economics. It's good for the community."

David.

Well it appears that the foreign owners of Victoria's power network, engage in aggressive tax avoidance.

So how can this be good economics?

David, I disagree with you strongly when you state that the government-subsidised, ad-free ABC is responsible for hollowing out the rest of the news industry.
The last phrase describes one of the innate problems of commercial operators; this is the belief that news can be an industry.

An industry exists to create a product then sell it.

News is not a commodity which can be sold; it is knowledge, awareness, information which is sought as a natural learning event by interested people.

Its commercialisation is peripheral to this activity. People do not buy newspapers, listen to radio, or watch television news so that they can absorb advertising. In many cases, the amount of advertising clutter engenders corporate resentment of the disseminator.

That is why the ABC ranks well above commercial organisations as a source of trusted news reportage; it is a national community service in a similar way to hospitals, museums and schools, and deserves funding by the government so as to preserve honest, reliable, trustworth reporting on news issues, without advertising influence.

I suspect that many commercial news markets are failing because they treat news as merely a vehicle for advertising revenue, and as advertising drops off, so does their operational viability.

The ABC has a vital role in society, hence should never be privatised.

The author needs to read and understand Professor Mariana Mazzucato's book The Entrepreneurial State. Prof. Mazzucato comprehensively demolishes the Public v. Private Sector myths. He could also learn plenty from Nature's Trust by law Professor Mary C. Wood.

On page 109 of the paper back edition there is a diagram showing the sources of the technology Apple includes in its "i" products. All the high tech gimmicks (touch screens, GPS, click wheels, cellular systems etc,) come from basic government research.
In the same way most USA medical drug developments flow from government owned laboratories or from government funded research.

As for the ABC; I neither watch nor listen to anything else. I refuse to spend my spare time listening to crappy advertisements for what are often even crappier products or to shock jocks who know little but are full of themselves. Sometime I despair at the lack of economic understanding displayed when ABC interviewers question politicians but where would we be without Four Corners, Big Ideas and the ABC produced drama programs?

So the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank and Teltra were worthwhile? Financial services profits were less than 5% of total profits within Australia. The profits are now about 30%. Someone is being skinned and it isn't the already wealthy.

Maybe the author is not aware that due to deregulation and poor prudential behaviour the private banks had to be bailed out by Rudd, Gillard Swann and Tanner.

Had Telstra not been privatised the copper wires would have been phased out long ago. Telstra started using fibre about 40 years ago. That process slowed decisively when privatisation was first aired.

I wonder if David, is one of those people who never watch the ABC, or are they just people he has heard of.

Gogglebox anyone.

Not quite correct, David. How a business is privatised is critical and is often done badly, so we land up with monopolies screwing the public. The best airport in the world for example, is Changi in Singapore. Owned by the Singapore Govt, but run as a corporation, which is what our Govts do so badly. Compare that to Sydney, where IMO people are simply fleeced because they can be and your theory is clearly mistaken.

I am against selling poles and wires in a place like WA, as what will happen is that service and maintenance simply won't be done, whereas right now Colin Barnett has finally bitten the bullet and is spending a fortune on finally upgrading the lines. They don't need to be gold plated, but every time a power pole topples over in summer, we land up with another fire started, with some pretty dire consequences. We need a reliable electricity service, even in the country, where it does not pay it's own way directly, but certainly does indirectly, as without the country areas, Perth would starve and go broke for lack of exports.

Rubbish ,we need to keep the bankers honest.http://kingworldnews.com/ecb-to-steal-greek-bank-deposits-as-greece-to-default-within-two-weeks-sending-shockwaves-around-the-world/