The profit motive.
Coming from the UK I don’t want competition in basic utilities like there is there. I don’t want to have to shop around for the best energy price every year, or to be at the mercy of the free market on pricing for the most basic of necessities like power and water.
I don't actually think the Australian grid is a good example of privatisation failure. There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything aside from the marching cry of the left.
Did we gain anything? I ask in earnest, I don't know.
I can guess that the cost of running, maintenance, etc are now "not a cost of the state", but the cost doesn't just disappear, it was always on the consumer via tax or bills (or tax and bills, hopefully in a way that sums to the same cost!).
As it pertains to power, People tend to promote government as a means to make it cheaper - but this is sort of a fallacy - the only way the government can do it cheaper is if it's operationally more efficient to a significant degree. I don't see how a government achieves this. Private energy generators are usually not very profitable - the people making money were commodity producers, recently, not electricity generators.
It’s not just cheaper, it takes the privatised profits off the table and instead feeds them back.
It’s not magic, it’s pretty good sense though, and it serves the people of the state well.
It's the hysterical marching cry of young naive people railing against the ever-increasingly vague boogeyman of neoliberalism but the actual evidence doesn't back it up.
You talk about ideology over logic while demonstrating that exact same thing.
> The AER report contains no consistent correlation between higher bills and privatisation.
> The ABS index of electricity prices across Australia, showing movement of electricity prices over time, also doesn't demonstrate a link between privatisation and price rises.
> Whether comparing electricity bills, prices or the relative price index of electricity in each state, there is no consistent link between privatisation and what consumers pay for their electricity.
> Experts say the biggest influences on what people pay for electricity are costs of transmission and distribution. They say these costs have risen in recent years irrespective of whether the owners of the transmission and distribution networks are privatised.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-25/fact-check-does-priva...
Will you entrust your well-being to CEOs and boards whose sole priority is relentless growth and maximizing profits, regardless of the consequences?
Laws can only do so much to prevent vital resources from becoming unaffordable for the very people who deserve them. These companies, with no regard for your, the citizen's, vote or input, prioritize profits above all else. To them, it's just another business move, leaving the consequences behind as they move on to the next venture.
You can argue and consider other ideas, but the higher risk in the private side is always there.
And they are easily reigned in by the Australian Electricity Regulator, while governments owned businesses are not.
We recently had a price cap put on coal and gas prices, private companies had to eat a massive loss, government owned generators huffed and puffed until they got billion dollar bailouts from the rest of the nation for their coal guzzling power plants that should have been shut down years ago had they not been taxpayer liabilities.
There's simply no evidence of these things driving up prices. We have a huge government owned pumped hydro power storage project underway that has blown out from $2b to $10b in the spacce of a few years, if this was privately owned it would have gone bankrupt, instead more and more cash from electricity users will eventually have to be paid to fund it. It's costing 5x more than simply putting grid scale batteries in the cities and the government has sunk cost fallacy that it can't walk away from.
This is the problem with government ownership of electricity assets in Australia, politics gets completely in the way of good decision making and projects that should have failed long ago.
As I said before, where's the evidence, because all I see is ideology.
This is what happens when governments run electricity projects:
> He assured the electorate it would cost $2 billion and be up and running by 2021.
> By April 2019, a contract for part of the project was signed for $5.1 billion — and that doesn't include transmission costs, which will cost billions more.
> Who will actually pay for transmission is still being decided.
> "Someone's going to pay for it," Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad told 7.30.
> "The taxpayers will pay for it through your taxes, or you pay for it through your bills.
The current cost is $10b and the project has blown out to the end of the decade. No one is admitting how far they've dug or the status of meeting targets. The transmission bill is still up in the air but will likely be an additional $5b added onto household bills.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-14/snowy-hydro-2.0-expen...
Also, the LNP have proved time and time again they can't build any public infrastructure.
Their Inland Rail project is another total disaster, a project wasting many more tens of billions and achieved absolutely nothing.
And how can anyone forget the failure that was the LNP re-design of the National Broadband; a design that moved away from fiber optic to instead use copper wire.
Put up your "logic" rather your ideology if you want to convince people otherwise. Downvotes don't count sorry :)
Prices are the cheapest in Victoria, with full privatisation of the network. Prices are also most expensive in South Australia, with nearly full privatisation of the network. No rational person can look at that and proclaim there is a correlation.
We have states with nearly all generation, distribution and transmission being government owned, we also have states completely out of the business. This should be a simple slam dunk to people who loudly make these easily proven claims and yet they never have any proof.
Prices are rising uniformly across the board, including in the heavily government owned states, which coincidently are the worst at rolling out renewables because they are protecting their fossil fuel golden eggs at the expense of the environment.
https://theconversation.com/myths-not-facts-muddy-the-electr...
While interesting time capsules one wonders whether Lynne Chester holds the same opinions today or has updated the prices tables 2007-2014 with more current data.
Personally I'd look less at the month to month prices and more at the decade on decade projections .. what are the winning long term strategies for cost effective power generation with the "lowest bad for climate" emmissions totals.
Is it a coincidence that Western Australia (WA), a state with the most government regulation in regard to LNG exports also has the lowest LNG prices by a long margin?
In general WA, has the most regulated energy sector with the highest level of public ownership in electricity production and transmission, and by strange coincidence it also has the cheapest gas, cheapest coal and lowest electricity prices.