While I could write a paragraph, I find it easier cutting & pasting Yabby's succinct statements which are well worth repeating:

"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".

The real problem with privatising public assets is that are no longer public. Profit motive means user pays and if you can't pay you don't get to use. We as a nation seem to forget that utilities were made public because private enterprise would stop delivering services to those who couldn't pay. They are called ESSENTIAL services for a reason... that is that are ESSENTIAL.

Effectively it called selling the cupboard bare. When the service or entity stops being a money making concern the private company wants out (i.e.. stops investing, upgrading services, employing people to fix problems etc) and we the public have to buy it back. It is a cost all round for the public - the water system in Victoria is terrible compared to 20 years ago, Telstra isn't too crash hot either. Normally it sold under value (read all the public utilities under Kennett), then will be sold back to us at current value despite it being neglected for many years and we, the public, lose again.

It is beyond short sighted and only makes things look good on paper for the very short term.

The modern liberal (and labour, unfortunately) idea that paying tax is a bad thing would have the truly forward thinking liberals of Playford, Bolte and (even) Menzies turning in their graves with the short-sightedness of it all. And Labour are part of the problem also. These twits want power for power's sake and don't want to leave any sort of legacy for the country except for more debt, more division between those who have and have not and more idiots thinking privatisation is a smart way of running a country.

What utter garbage grumpy old man.

Taxes never ever got any where near modern rates for middle income earners when they were running the place. It was Whitlam who started the rot, followed by every Labor government since.

In 1964, when I first got to earn the average wage, I was paying just 7.5% income tax. Granted I had an uncle who was earning 10 times the average wage complaining he gave 54% of his pay to the government in tax, but average wage earners paid nothing like the ridiculous amount in PAYE we do today.

We also paid less than half the tax/excise we do today on fuel, tobacco & alcohol. There was no GST either.

Government spending was a much smaller percentage of GDP, & public servants were paid low wages in exchange for job security.

Sales tax brought in much that is GST today, & import duty also was a good stream of government income, but in general, taxes were much lower, as was government waste.

Just asking a few question here but do these leaders of ours when selling out our assets do their figures include welfare payments for all the unemployed people from these sales/lease, and when its government run how much difference is in the balance of payments
Also when these leases are getting near the end, how much DEFERRED maintenance would a private company do
one of the things i have notice different between gov vs private is that private doesn't generally employ schoolboys (never had a job) to run their businesses, Why does Government ?

What is interesting is the numbers of politicians who jump right into public/private companies.

There was a news article about some of the Queensland politicians sliding into corporate jobs.

Politicians and honesty! Who ever believes that also believes 'Cows can fly!"