Alas rehctub another public asset lost.

Some of this stuff is almost the stuff of satire, similar to the privatising of toll roads with government guarantees of profits. If no profit WE the hapless taxpayer compensate the corporations with money that could have funded the new road in the first place.

Bad planning, bad management and an obsession with economic rationalism hence the corporate model as per Poirot's post.

Soon there will be nothing to sell and much of Australia's public assets will be foreign owned. How will the governments manage? They will have to do what they should have done before the Great Sell Offs and that is better management and a commitment to public services not bolstering opportunities for corporations to the detriment of people.

Hasn't anyone noticed there is no privatization of water in all this.

Those water companies belong to the state government, & local councils. The only difference is that we have found a way of giving a large number of bureaucrats a nice fat salary to do what council minions have done for years.

Councils have been making a killing on water supply for years. Not too much wrong with that, as it helps keep the general rate down.

The problem is the couple of extra layers of bureaucrats eating up too much of that money, with the new system forced on us by Beattie & Bligh.

there are governments which can manage and they don't sell off public assests. then there are governments which can't manage and they sell off public assets. After the sale they then pay exorbitant fees for the use of the assets they sold. The coalition is guilty of this as is Labor. the fringe parties are party to it.
we are all guilty of letting this happen. the most guilty of ruining the economy are the investors. it is of of course all denied but a couple more earthquakes and floods will bring all this out into the open and gradually pull up this dreadful bandwagon.

A public-private partnership is where risk and overruns go to the public sector, profit to the private sector and political donations to the party in government.

'we are all guilty of letting this happen.'

Yes we are. The last tax increase has passed. The electorate will never again allow any governmnet to raise taxes. So this is how government's survive. Be thankful, when there is nothing left around the house to flog off on ebay, then they will really have to cut services!

Before 'User Pays', people accepted their tax would pay for services they don't always use. They still pay of course, you cant even park at the beach without paying these days. I bet if people added up all the little unseen taxes and tolls they'd find they're no better off than when they allowed tax increases. And they wouldn't have to deal with 'commercial in confidence.

Public assets are being sold off to service debt.Bring back Govt owned banks like the Commonwealth which can create in their computers new money to equal increases in our GDP as a tax credit instead of debt to private banksters.

On Privatisation it is amazing how we all agree.

"Soon there will be nothing to sell and much of Australia's public assets will be foreign owned".

How true Pelican, and how disgraceful is that ?, when our ancestors built and provided the basis of public infrastructure for our future, that we allowed political ideologues to sell it to their mates cheap, in comparison to the outcomes/benefits/lack of power the consumer has to accept for selling the asset, and then renting the same asset off the people they sold it too.

Just doesn't make any sense at all does it.