Dagget
Privatising banks and building societies frees funds for more socially useful investment in areas like schools and hospitals. The case of monopolies like Telstra is more debatable, but do you remember how poor and expensive Telstra’s service was before it was opened to competition?

Economists are not so much critical of GDP as aware of its limitations – it is not “false”, but needs to be interpreted along with other data. Other economic indicators also only give us only part of the picture – employment and unemployment, real wages, consumption and household incomes, the balance between households’ assets and liabilities etc – but all are real welfare measures, and taken together they present a compelling picture of progress in economic welfare.

Most economists will also freely admit that economic data are not a complete picture of quality of life. But your selection of entirely negative examples is absurdly one-sided, and I tried to show that there are many non-economic quality of life measures that are improving.

One of the advantages (and limitations) of GDP is that it applies a common benchmark (money) to the value of a variety of economic activities. There can be no comparable single measure of quality of life because there is no objective or universally accepted way of wrighting or comparing different indicators:

- is the decline in youth suicide enough to offset the rise in youth drug taking?
- Is the reduced capacity to repair your own car (bemoaned at length in the article) offset by the improved safety and reliability of modern vehicles?
- Is the increase in greenhouse gas emissions offset by the decrease in air pollutants such as SO2 that directly harm human health?

This means that there will always be scope for pessimists like you and optimists like me to disagree on whether overall quality of life is getting better or worse. But on the narrower question of economic welfare, the balance of evidence is overwhelmingly positive.

Billie – apologies, my 2 posts in 24hrs are used. I’ll respond with links tomorrow.

Rhian, please don't waste the time of forum users regurgitating the same tired old arguments which are irrelevant to the issue of privatisation.

I think I remember a time when a computer with 128K of RAM cost more than $5000. So what does the fact that telecommunications services were once more expensive than they are today prove?

When Telstra (or Telecom as it was then known) was a publicly owned monopoly, it was, in fact, a world leader in telecommunications.

In "The Broadband Fiasco" in the Spring 2007 edition of Dissent Magazine (http://www.dissent.com.au - edited by the same Kenneth Davidson referred to by Ho Hum above at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6326#92704) Allan J. Williams writes:

"Initially as a government department, the Post-Master General's Department, and then as the corporatised but wholly publicly-owned Telecom Australia, it embarked on a significant research into the digital future. That vision of a nationally-owned information superhighway was encapsulated in Telecom 2000, a report published in 1976 which foresaw a broadband future with open access for information service providers to fibre optic cables of practically unlimited capacity that reached all Australian homes.

"Telecom stood at the international forefront of digital understanding with leading edge research laboratories that were undertaking research on digital switching and transmission. Its engineers were world leaders ..."

So what went wrong?

Essentially the Labor Government was captured by exactly the same neoliberal ideological claptrap that you are now peddling to this forum. The telecommunications market was first deregulated by the then Telecommunications Minister Kim Beazley with the full support of the then Liberal opposition. This deprived Telecom/Telstra of much revenue it needed to continue with its information superhighway program. Then it was partially privatised and then fully privatised by the Howard Government and we have the mess that we have today. For further information read "Caught in no-man's land" by Kevin Morgan from the Spring 2004 edition of Dissent Magazine also at http://www.citizensagainstsellingtelstra.com/content/3/no-mans-land.html

Other useful information regarding the privatisation of Telstra can be found on that site, mostly at http://www.citizensagainstsellingtelstra.com/news.html, although it is somewhat dated having been neglected by me for some time.

(James Sinnamon)

Rhian writes at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6326#92864
that “House price rises are a serious problem for first-time buyers who bought homes in the past 4 years, which is a minority of households. Owners who haven’t moved house in recent years, or who traded up, are less stressed by house price rises (and some are substantial winners).”

I would disagree substantially:
House prices have been a problem since land was bought and sold, and, in the British system, dispossession has been the theme since the 13th century. In Australia the Menzies-led trend away from state provision of worker accommodation to privatization of land ‘production’ from the 1960s has made shelter an increasing burden for many and has completely removed the choice of working or self-sufficiency from a growing majority. At the same time land has aggregated into fewer and fewer hands, along with its products (agriculture, mining), along with control over the economy and government.

The ABS statistics, including the CPI, entirely fail to reveal this dismal relationship between poverty and ‘progress’ because they have never ever counted the cost of land. Land-costs comprise the bulk of expenses in a house-land ‘package’, and in farming, mining, manufacturing. Furthermore the cost of land (and related resources like water) form the basis of all other costs. For this reason as land-costs rise, so do food costs and material costs.

The reason that Australians can still afford disposable consumables from other countries is our relatively sparse population in a commodity economy during a commodity boom which raises the value of the dollar and access to credit. This means that we can afford to purchase stuff from ‘developing’ economies where either the cost of land has not inflated the cost of labour or the workers are more or less enslaved. Our own wages must keep up with the rising cost of food and accommodation. Workers are driven harder because of this (“productivity gains” to which Sinnamon alludes with ‘work intensification’). Manufacturing becomes more expensive.

Continued next post

Continued from http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6326#92912

For this reason our economy is devolving into one of globally corporatised primary production, real-estate marketing, and services. Much of our domestic economic activity relies on the import of immigrant land-purchasers and business people who pay the price of entry with a deposit for their sponsors and a deposit for their homes.

In Australia it is the asset holders, increasingly corporatised, who affect the agenda for government. (APop, the Australian Property Council etc).

Rhian’s comments about the ABS stats are beside the point because those stats and Rhian’s comments do not deal with the cost of land; they only deal with the comparatively negligible cost of building. Rents and what you get for them ultimately reflect land-costs like everything else.

I think that Rhian’s comments bear out the effectiveness of government propaganda, especially the ideological remarks about the ‘deprivation model’, which are right from the program we hear and read from the corporate press and government PR. The belief that we have been better off for the past 40 years needs a basis for comparison other than the marketed one of cheap stuff for the land-poor and it needs a much longer historical and cultural context. I was unable to access the Age article, but the Age derives much of its income from property marketing and allied investments and is therefore a very poor source of opinion on the subject of this debate. The only place you get land prices is from the banks and they don't give them out for free.
An important step in democracy and the fight to improve quality of life as opposed to quantity of stuff would be to make these statistics public access and free.

i am aware this is a debate and you can quote statistics until the cows come home but it doesn't alter the fact the price of things have escalated and the average wage has not kept pace.I am not using more electricity but my bill is almost double.Don't eat more food but my groceries cost considerably more.Don't make more 'phone calls but my bill is 1/2 as much again.
I think the sale of big screen tv's is mostly due to the govt giving 12 year old girls 4000 to have babies.
Have had microwave,internet,phone ,t.v and cars since before 1997 thank god because i couldn't afford to buy any of them now if i still wished to eat.I do splurge once a week on fish and chips,cost a total of $10.Long time since i've been able to afford chinese for tea.
Insurance,rates,rego,car repairs or services,all gone through the roof.
Once i could save a little each week.Now i walk through the supermarket adding my purchases as i go.If i'm lucky enough to have any money left i use that for petrol.
The middle and lower income bracket are worse off then ten years ago.People can deny that all they want but i know the facts because i'm one of those people.This has nothing to do with supporting any political party,this is the truth.

Dont expect much sympathy, haygirl. To the intelligent "big picture" people here you are insignificant. I believe that the public interest is being sold out for the sake of a few profiting greatly, much as it has with the USA's health system.

Queensland is a good case in point: There is repeated trumpeting of how population growth is driving prosperity in QLD, yet everything you see says otherwise. The main driver of prosperity has been the commodities boom, not population growth. And with all the extra revenue, infrastructure and services are a shambles, and public debt is projected to blow out to 52 billion dollars in the near future. Queensland had no debt in the not too distant past.

Now you might say that this is due to hopeless governance. But it could also be explained by the enormous cost of coping with a growing population. The truth could readily be found, but the answer might not be what some want to hear.