Literally no government service has ever run better once privatised. It's always ended up more expensive and less effective. I have no idea why the idea that privatising services is a solution to anything except unsatisfied greed.
Prove me wrong with just one example.
privatising a public service is basically just adding a middle man skimming off the top
Capitalist governments be like look how good we are at spending money efficiently. Meanwhile, burns cash on useless middle men.
Commonwealth Bank isn't really any different. Not better, not worse.
There was a good period there where Qantas was consistently getting better and cheaper than it was under public ownership. It's gone downhill in the last decade, though.
Privatising the Post Offices has led to wildly variable experiences, some post offices are far worse, but if you have a good franchisee, some of them are much better.
I'm still dirty about privatising Medibank, and it cost the Libs 15 years in opposition. But today's Medibank competes well in the private health sector.
Telstra .... nah, just kidding. But it is getting better than it has been.
Maybe that's the secret - it takes 20+ years for something privatised to get better? These examples have all been private since last century.
You need to factor in what privatising these things paid for as well. I don't remember about any of my examples, but the WA government privatising elements of the land register and ports in the last few years has allowed it to fund Metronet.
Metronet is a long term major project that will help the population for decades.
Commonwealth Bank isn’t really any different. Not better, not worse.
Take their current profits and imagine they were going to government income instead.
Doesn't matter if it works better or worse (who gets to determine this and by what measure?), it's a matter of who benefits from ownership.
Privatised employment services are a shining example of a privatised service that "runs better".
It feathers the nest of capitalists with premium, predictable, inexhaustible government money.
It discourages legitimate claimants from seeking social security.
It perpetuates the notion that being unemployed and poor is the fault of the incurable laziness of the unemployed and poor.
Of course, it doesn't actually reduce unemployment or lift people out of generational poverty, but the only way to do that is to create jobs.
I feel like someone once wrote between two and three volumes of a book about this
Cool. Now stfu and advocate for the removal of mutual obligations. Anything less than that and you're still a scab and class traitor. This issue is actually surprisingly simple, no mutual obligations = no tax payer money going to welfare frauds (JSP system). Then we can start discussing how to reform employment support and what that would look like. But any system that's underpinned by mutual obligations will be deeply flawed.
