In today's modern society this statement seems almost scandalous but seeing as governments are trying to negate their responsibilities by selling everything they have, society is worse off for it.
The national telco Telstra is a profitable business and has been the subject of countless ASIC investigations since the concept of anti-competitiveness was mooted but if you look at its stablemate Australia Post, it has neither the infrastructure nor the base from which to turn a profit and therefore no-one's pointed the finger.
Personally I think that all infrastructure providers be they electricity, water, telephone, roads, rail, airports etc are esentially public domain and therefore should be in the hands of a trustee, that is the government (for want of some better trustee) as custodian should not have had the rights to sell any of these.
There are a few counter arguments to public ownership of goods, the first of these is that property can not be publicly owned. This may be correct but a trustee holds property in trust for the benefit of the beneficiaries of the trust. Does this hold true for the government?
The capital consumption argument suggests that governments can not re-invest the profits generated by quangos. I argue this because all quangos are by inference run by an independant board of govenors and therefore must re-invest anything they have as prudent management - esentially no different from a public company.
So I'm a big lefty, but I argue that the government is no more incompetant than the private business who would run the same organisation afterwards. Profit motives can not plan beyond the next few years whereas governments need to look beyond the next elections, and sadly of late they don't.
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