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April Fool's jokes are a thing of the past. Impossible to imagine any far-fetched totally outrageous and unbelievable thing that the NSW Labor government hasn't already actually done or is about to do.
Take prison privatisation. I mean, when you saw the headline - NSW government to press ahead with privatisation of the prisons you would certainly have said, yeah, right, pull the other one, next thing there'll be a story about how Kevin Rudd is a secret socialist, Peter Garrett an environmentalist. We get it already, April 1, April Fool's Day, now, where is the real news?
Privatisation is so 1990s, isn't it? Once upon a time conservatives of the Left and Right believed "Private good, Public bad" and proceeded to sell off all the family silver and the kitchen sink in order to improve the efficiency of the economy, serve the public better, and generally usher in a utopian world beyond the dreams of socialists. It was never really about that of course, it was only ever about letting a few very rich people exploit an ever increasing slice of the human pie for profit. But whenever people suggested that some organisation previously working for the public good should not be swallowed up by some faceless private equity group, or some con man with shiny shoes and a Lamborghini, they were howled down as Marxists, who didn't seem to realise that the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Russian Mafia was now in charge of Russia.
But since then, the social and economic damage caused by newly private companies has become as blatantly obvious as the environmental damage caused by coal-powered power stations. Think Telstra, airports, tunnels and freeways, bus companies, train companies, electricity supplies, universities (in a slightly different way), child care, aged care, schools, Wheat Board, unemployment services, horse quarantine, health insurance and, further back, Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. Not too many success stories out of that little lot, in fact you could say a series of train wrecks.
The reasons? Should have been obvious to all of us not blinded by the ideology of "Private good, Public bad". Big business isn't in the business of serving the public, but in the business, purely and simply and single-mindedly, of making profits, for shareholders and executives. Anything that gets in the way of making money - the costs of maintenance work, the cost of serving groups with high needs and low incomes, safety concerns, improving technology, avoiding risk - will be ditched, quick smart. And money is to be made by pushing consumption, producing disposable goods with short use by dates, closing down competition, serving only the most profitable cities and suburbs. And really big money comes from playing around the market, takeovers here, asset sales there, shonky bribes up that way, risky investments over the other side. All sort of ok when the stockmarket climbs ever higher like a force of nature; not so good, when, inevitably, the financial reckoning comes.
So I don't believe that the NSW government really wants to privatise prisons or energy supplies. They would have to be fools, wouldn't they? And not just for April.
prison privatisation