cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/33395211
* provided you have decently well functioning public service, and it’s not a country with high levels of corruption.
I hold the belief that things being equal there is almost no situation in which privatisation of public services has ever been a positive for the average person.
However, I’m keen to hear arguments, examples or studies where privatisation has gone well [1], and has been a net positive to society, and could not have been performed by the government.
I don’t believe there are such examples, and I believe (with too many real world examples to list) that privatisation always leads to enshittification and budget blow outs eventually because private companies exist to maximise profits.
This community (!aussocialism@aussie.zone) does not delete comments that disagree with socialism, so you’re very much encouraged to share your views respectfully.
[1] for countries that have some level of democracy at that point in history i.e. I’m not really interested in the example of China becoming capitalist, 1. because Chinese “socialism” was never control of society by the workers, and was (and still is) a top-down hierarchical dictatorship - which had a ruling class determined by party position, and now also determined by wealth. No wonder that things were being run so poorly before they decided to be capitalist. Dictatorships don’t usually breed very good conditions for sensible management. 2. They still have most core government services being administered by government departments.


What do we actually get from having a private company run the service though (in the case of Metro Trains), instead of just employing everyone directly?
What exactly do we get by having private companies do the retail side of the NBN? Instead of just having the NBN provide the service at cost (which they’re already doing, and it’s just being sold on to us by private companies who repackage the bandwidth and usage in different ways). Same logic for gas and electricity (in Victoria, not all states do this). What are we actually getting by having it repackaged and sold on to us with a markup?
Seems to me were unnecessarily paying an extra margin to account for profit. We could just employ those permanent workers directly.
Water (in Victoria) corporations are actually government-owned corporatised water authorities. Which again makes no sense and we get nothing from having them being administered separately.
Here’s an interesting video on the initial privatisation of the metropolitan trains and trams under Kennett, which was an absolute disaster: https://youtube.com/watch?v=34fGlurh42A