The SMH has uncovered a ‘harebrained’ plan to commercialise NSW’s public transport and roads in a bid to hide costs from the state budget:
A highly confidential report for the government by consultancy giant PwC reveals that corporatising the state’s transport networks was deemed the best option to plug a multi-billion dollar budget black hole from a shell corporation it had created.
The state’s ferries, trains, light rail, buses and roads, worth tens of billions of dollars, would be placed into a commercial corporation with a board and management independent of the government…
A Herald investigation revealed in June that TAHE was set up in 2015 to enable the government to hide the costs of the state’s rail system. It prompted former NSW Auditor-General Tony Harris to describe the entity as a financial mirage that had bolstered the government’s operating result by more than $30 billion over the past six years “through an accounting gimmick”…
Labor finance spokesman Daniel Mookhey said… “turning Transport for NSW into a for-profit corporation is a harebrained idea”.
Why has the NSW Government engaged PwC for this analysis rather than its own transport department? How much were PwC paid?
With borrowing rates so low, why is it necessary to commercialise the state’s public assets?
The new commercial owners would almost certainly use their market power to force-up user costs, leaving taxpayers worse-off overall. We have seen this time and time again with ports, airport parking, public transport, toll roads, and utilities. In most cases, the cost-of-living burden for users is worse than any cost savings to the government, with the added drawback that the system is less transparent because monopoly profits are easier to hide from public view.
The problem with neoliberalism is that eventually there is nothing left to sell-off and citizens are left as renters of their own country.
