Issue # 1408      29 April 2009

Anger mounts at NSW public assets sell-off

“…this government stands alone in its determination to flog off everything that’s not nailed down”
Leon Waster

Less than a year ago the then NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma and his much reviled treasurer Michael Costa were driven from office by the union led resistance of the NSW people to the government’s plans to lease out and sell off NSW’s electricity generation and supply system.

Iemma’s successor, the “left” Labor Premier Nathan Rees is now creating the same possibility for himself, as anger mounts over his determination to sneak through, not just the privatisation of NSW’s electricity assets, but a whole range of further public asset sell-offs, to build up his government’s war chest for the next election.

This desperate gamble is predicated on the “battle fatigue” of the Australian Labor Party’s own base – its rank and file branch members and the union movement – who, the government hopes will hesitate to take out yet another Labor premier when the government already faces a drubbing at the polls in early 2011.

The NSW government has fine tuned its electricity privatisation plans – for instance, leases to operate power stations are now for 20 years instead of 50, as previously proposed – but also ferry services, jails, the NSW state lottery, waste management services and management of public sector superannuation funds are also up for sale.

What plans for privatisation lie beyond this, in a state where public school playgrounds are already being flogged off to developers to pay teachers’ salaries, depends on what a desperate government and its ideologically driven Treasury can get away with.

The government hopes its fire sale of public assets is a done deal by the time the NSW ALP holds its Annual Conference in October. It was at this conference that Iemma and his then treasurer Michael Costa came to grief in 2008, after defying a 702–107 vote against their plans to privatise electricity.

The first shots in the renewed war between the politicians and the people over privatisation came in February, after the government axed the public Jetcat ferry service to Manly and tendered the service to a private operator. The operator used as a guide the federal WorkChoices laws to impose cuts in wages and safety conditions on the new service. It shut the covering union, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), out of workplace negotiations. Had it succeeded, it would have created a strong incentive for private operators to tender for the entire ferry service on the basis of non-union wages and conditions, but a week-long community picket supporting the MUA’s efforts to protect the workers’ rights and passengers’ safety forced the employer to enter into a union protected enterprise agreement with its employees. Nevertheless, the threat of privatised ferry services remains.

The next stoush has come out of the government’s attempt to contract out management of Cessnock and Parklea jails to the corporate sector. John Robertson, ex-secretary of Unions NSW, who led last year’s campaign against privatising electricity – for which he was rewarded with a seat in parliament and a portfolio as Minister for Corrective Services and Public Sector Reform – now has the task of forcing through the sale of prisons, as well as other privatisations in waiting, such as the sale of NSW Lotteries announced just before Easter.

The NSW branch of the Public Service Association (PSA), which covers prison officers and other staff in NSW jails, is strongly opposing the “Cell Off” – with considerable community support in the case of Cessnock, already hard hit by the recent closure of the Pacific Brands factory in the town, with the company exporting its manufacturing jobs to China.

These battles are only the start of what promises to be a bitter struggle for the PSA and other unions covering public sector services, as the government starts to play out its privatisation gamble at the very time the global financial crisis is precipitating sackings across industries and joblessness grows.

At a “Power to the People” forum held at the Australian manufacturing Workers’ Union Tom Mann Theatre on April 18, to defend the public sector and raise people’s awareness of the NSW government’s current plans to sell of key public assets, union leaders expressed their anger and dismay at the government’s almost suicidal drive to privatise, despite a strong and constant opposition to such plans in the electorate.

They also expressed their commitment, at the union level, to take up the fight on behalf of their members and the communities affected by the government’s actions.

Warren Smith, secretary of the MUA Sydney branch, referred to the recent fight to protect ferry workers’ wages and safety conditions and the ongoing struggle to maintain ferry services in public hands. He declared that “It doesn’t matter who you are – Labor, Liberal or anyone else – if you are going to attack workers then we are ready to pull you on.”

Steve Turner, assistant general secretary of the PSA, questioned the logic of a government that could sell two jails to save just $16 million a year, then turn around and announce it was selling off NSW Lotteries, a “cash cow” that delivers more than $400 million to the government annually.

“At a time when governments around the world are nationalising assets and services, this government stands alone in its determination to flog off everything that’s not nailed down,” he declared.

United Services Union officer, Scott McNamara, whose members work in call centres servicing the energy retail sector, spoke of his concerns for their jobs, calling the government’s privatisation plans “irresponsible”.

“Not only will any sell-off of the state’s energy retailers in a global financial crisis result in a loss of profit for taxpayers, it will also put thousands of jobs at risk at a time when unemployment is on the rise,” he told the forum, adding that workers, particularly in regional areas, where the energy retailers’ call centres were located, faced “unacceptable” threats to their futures, and the economic viability of their towns, as jobs are cut, or moved off-shore.

Mr McNamara added that though he was an Australian Labor Party member he would find it hard to give a first preference vote to the ALP at the next election while ever it was determined to carry through its privatisation agenda.

Unions NSW campaign officer, Paul Doughty, spoke of the need to build a campaign over the next three years to ensure neither Labor nor Liberal would risk going to the 2011 election with a privatisation agenda, or dare to carry out a privatisation agenda in their term in office.

Brett Collins of the Prisoners Action Group pointed out from the floor that for the first time both prisoners and prison officers were on the same side in a fight. He said the takeover of prisons by global operators like Wakenhutt Corp was turning prisoners into slaves, whose exploitation generated super-profits in privatised prison factories.

He argued that a campaign against the ransacking of the public sector needed to focus its message and start to get traction immediately, not just two or three years down the road.

“Unions can declare a black ban on any products coming from the slave labour of private prison factories and stop materials for prison factories from getting in now,” Mr Collins stated.

The 2007 Rights at Work campaign ran an effective “marginal” seats strategy in the federal election, one so successful that Liberal-National seats with margins of up to 20 percent were pushed to the wire. This was because the campaign went deeply into the community in effectively delivering a focused message.

As well as ridding Australia of its most reactionary government in a hundred years, the campaign created expectations that a Labor government, hoping to come to office with minimum commitments, has found difficult to evade.

An “anti-privatisation” campaign needs to not only defend the public sector, but advocate its extension, in a way that ensures stronger community management and control.

A central aspect of such a campaign, when its target is an ALP government on the nose with the electorate, is to ensure that the campaign finds its electoral expression in a shift to the left, not the right, that is, as a result of the campaign voters do not give preferences to the Liberals to punish Labor.

Left candidates, able to clearly project an alternative voice for working class and progressive voters need to run in as many ALP held seats as possible.

Rather than a marginal seat strategy, as used by the Rights at Work campaign to shift the electorate left from Liberal-National to Labor, a campaign for the public sector needs a Labor heartland strategy that allows disenfranchised Labor voters in “safe” ALP seats to move beyond Labor, rather than be forced back on to the Liberals or scattered independents, thus reinforcing the monopoly of the two-party system.

However, an effective electoral strategy can only emerge when a deeper, ongoing grassroots campaign directly connects with organised labour, workers and communities to build a movement that goes beyond laborism and demands fundamental changes in society. This requires engaging with the people and setting out with them on a socialist pathway, where people not profits and cooperation not exploitation will determine how society shapes its future.

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