Job shedding is a common and appropriate feature of industries where rapid technological change is driving strong productivity growth. I expect you’ll disagree, but I believe that taking decisions about staffing levels in utilities out of the hands of politicians is one of the benefits of privatisation.

I didn’t follow the NSW privatisation debate in detail, but would not be in the least surprised if Gittens is right that the arguments used were not the real reasons motivating the proponents of privatisation. The same can be said for a large number of public policy positions, both good (acting to avert climate change) and bad (extended detention of asylum seekers). Thank you for acknowledging that I do not approve of this common feature of public debate.

The example you quote from the USA may show that private providers acted from self-interest in attempting to prevent loss of business to the public sector. But it emphatically does not show that “most proponents of privatisation are opposed to the government are opposed to providing any services whatsoever.” To prove your point you would need to show them opposing government involvement not only in health but also in defence, law and order, education, infrastructure services, etc. Which of course you can’t.

I challenge you to quote any Australian business leader, association, think tank etc saying that government should provide no services whatsoever.

Rhian wrote, "Job shedding is a common and appropriate feature of industries where rapid technological change is driving strong productivity growth. ..."

Trujillo is and was notoriously technologically incompetent, as was Ziggy Switkowski before him. So, what makes you presume that there was a technological justification for job shedding?

As I showed, Trujillo, ruined US West. Recently he bungled the NBN bid through bloody-minded bullying brinksmanship and now, as a result, has caused even his hand-picked loyal Operations Manager Greg Winn to resign. Futhermore, from 2000 to 2003 he ruined Graviton:

... Between late 2000 and early 2003, he was the CEO and Chairman of a technology company called Graviton. The company was housed here in this building at La Jolla - San Diego's Silicon Valley. Investors believed its cutting-edge technology promising enough to pour US$60 million into the company. Graviton hired Sol Trujillo to take the company to the next level.

REPORTER: And how did he perform?

RUDY FISCHER, FORMER HEAD OF HUMAN RESOURCES, GRAVITON: I'd say he performed dismally. It was kind of a shame because we had a lot of very bright research engineers working very hard and developing new technology and I think were making some progress.

(For more read http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/sol_trujillo_on_the_line_130713)

Rhian wrote, "... I expect you'll disagree, but I believe that taking decisions about staffing levels in utilities out of the hands of politicians is one of the benefits of privatisation."

As I have shown, the broader Australia also emphatically disagrees.

The only plausible reason that anyone could prefer corporate thugs, rather than people who are ultimately accountable to the Australian people to make decisions about staff numbers is a lack of any abiding commitment to the principle of democracy.

As you should well know the principle reason for job shedding was not because of new technologies, rather it was to improve Telstra's short term bottom line, and I expect you understand the difference.

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It was to improve Telstra's profitability by ruthlessly eliminating services that were no longer deemed profitable, by shifting the cost of obtaining skills onto the broader community as they did when the world class telecommunications technicians' schools were closed in the 1990's and, more recently, linesmans schools were closed and by a 'race to the bottom' shifting of jobs to the Third World.

Rhian wrote, "I challenge you to quote any Australian business leader, association, think tank etc saying that government should provide no services whatsoever."

Perhaps Australian business leaders are more astute to state that openly and may not be able to. However, for me, the proof is in the outcomes of decades of policies enacted to pander to their selfish interests:

Massive hospital waiting lists, homelessness whilst waiting lists for public housing are also massive, mentally ill people dumped on the streets to fend for themselves, the shambolic state of aged health care, Howard's despicable axing of the Commonwealth dental health program back in 1996, affordable dignified funeral services totally beyond the reach of many. etc, etc.

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Regarding NSW electricity privatisation, I will give you URLs more specific than http://candobetter.org/NswElectricity when our webserver is back online.

Daggett

If these data point to a secret conspiracy for government to provide no services, then the conspiracy must have been deeply unsuccessful.

If it had succeeded there would be no such thing as a public housing waiting list, because there would be no such thing as public housing. There would be no public hospital waiting lists, because there’d be no pubic hospitals. Also, there’d be no public sector teachers, nurses, police, fire service personnel, social workers, aged care workers, or general public servants. Yet in fact employment in all of these categories has grown steadily since the Howard government’s election in 1996 (ABS catalogue number 6248.0).

You can’t presume to know what other people “really” think without reference to their words and actions, especially when you propose a view as preposterous as "most proponents of privatisation are opposed to the government are opposed to providing any services whatsoever."

Privatisation means there are now fewer public sector employees in sectors such as communication than there once were. But for all your hyperventilating about job losses, total employment in this sector has grown at an average rate of 2.6% a year in the past 10 years, significantly faster than the 2.1% growth in employment across the economy as a whole (ABS catalogue number 6202.0).

Firstly, Rhian, you have not responded to my points which refute your nonsense that the only possible explanation for redundancies at Telstra was necessity caused by technological change and you ignored my point about how cost-shifting is employed to dishonestly portray privatised enterprise as more efficient than publicly owned enterprises.

Instead, it seems you want to lead this discussion off onto a tangent.

Of course it would be difficult to prove conclusively that right wing neo-liberal idelogues and the wealthy elites they serve intend to destroy all public services and I don't intend to, but the evidence that that is where they wish to lead us seems conclusive to me.

Rhian wrote, "... in fact employment in all of these categories has grown steadily since the Howard government’s election in 1996 (ABS catalogue number 6248.0)."

Garbage!

I would sure like to see the statistics.

In fact this was a topic of discussion on John Quiggin's web site:

"I have a sister that has been working in the public sector for 30 years. No new young people are coming in or being hired. Yet older people are taking redundancy and coming back and double dipping by taking contracts which get rolled over." (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/01/15/short-and-sharp-2/#comment-226354)

"That's the point I am making. John Howard made it possible for those in positions of control in the public sector to effectively 'retire' enter redundancy, take their superannuation, and then come back on contracts (you can work as long as you want) which simply is stopping new young people entering the public service and effectively one person is being paid a double salary, whilst another is prevented from being employed at all." (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/01/15/short-and-sharp-2/#comment-226388)

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"You are missing my point. I was counting the physical number of jobs in the public sector then and now. I am not suggesting we immediately hire another 100,000 public servants if they are going to get dressed up in suits, pay themselves in excess of 100,000 and sit on a committee inventing new key performance indicators for underfunded overcrowded understaffed under-resourced hospitals. But by all means - hire nurses, teachers, road construction crews, bus drivers (and add the capital to replace the worn out bits). The government has abrogated its role to actually run in total (not PPS style disasters) decent services and its historically important role as an employer." (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2009/01/15/short-and-sharp-2/#comment-226405)

In fact I lost my research programmer's job back in 2004 largely thanks to Howard's miserly penny-pinching and friend with a PhD and worked as researcher at a University now works as an aged care worker, thanks to Howard.

If the public service is so large, then why can't I find a job as a public servant?

Rhian wrote, "But for all your hyperventilating about job losses, total employment in this sector has grown at an average rate of 2.6% a year in the past 10 years, significantly faster than the 2.1% growth in employment across the economy as a whole (ABS catalogue number 6202.0)."

And we could also increase employment opportunities by making the economy as inefficient as we possibly can. No doubt a good deal of these new jobs are due to the duplication of effort and all the ridiculous inefficiencies that imposing a supposedly competitive model on a natural monopoly has brought about. And how many of these jobs are interesting, and have decent pay, conditions, training and career paths?