MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Ms SHARKIE (Mayo) (15:49): I want to take us back to the nineties, one of my favourite decades. Back in 1997, the Reserve Bank of Australia reported that increasing privatisation of the public sector was surpassing overseas trends. We had one of the larger privatisation programs in the OECD.

What we saw in that decade and the decade that followed was that, whether it was financial services, electricity, gas, transport or communication, all of them were privatised. They were government, they were Australian, they were national assets, and we privatised them, and we did that for a quick hit to the bottom line, to make it look like we were not in so much debt.

But, ultimately, we've paid a bigger price for it since. I'm talking about Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, our state banks, our insurance offices and our airports. Our airports are privately owned.

Everything has been sold off. In South Australia, we had the Electricity Trust of South Australia. If you needed a new connection, it was pretty reasonable to do; it was seen as a service delivered.

Now it's all about profit. The ETSA sale has been criticised by South Australians for many, many years because, after the privatisation, we saw high consumer prices, a loss of public revenue and, importantly, a loss of service delivery—so much so that, if you live in the regions, it's near impossible to get an electricity connection now. You try and work out some sort of convoluted way of having solar panels and this and that, and we just don't deliver those services that we used to.

Now I'd like to talk about employment services. When many of us in this place were young, we still had the CES; we had the Commonwealth Employment Service. Now—and successive governments have done this—we've put tender out to tender to ensure that employment services would fail.

Ultimately, if you are a person who is long-term unemployed, your ability to connect into the employment market is very diminished. Why? That's because it's largely run now by—and the contracts are awarded to—for-profit companies.

I think an American company had the biggest share in the last tender. What happens is that those companies are there to make a profit. They're not really there to service the individual or to service the community; they are there to make profit, and they're not ashamed to say that that's what they're there to do.

What happens is that the individual misses out. So if you are a long-term unemployed person, the amount of service and support that you get to help you find a job, intensively working with you, is just not there, because they'll cherry-pick the people who are easiest to get in, the ones that they can very quickly get their return on investment on—because that's what it's all about.

It's all about return on investment. It's not about delivering services for people. Again, if I go back to the nineties and I think of the South Australian government back then, they were the largest employer of apprentices.

They had refrigeration apprentices. They had carpenters. They put so many young people through apprenticeships.

And we wonder now why we don't have enough people doing apprenticeships. It's because we've largely, as a state, offshored that and sent that over to the private sector, saying: 'Well, you can train the young people, not us. We as a state government will not do that.' And so we have seen a massive drop in ability for the public, for example in public works.

No matter what it is, it's diminished us all. All we've done is an immediate sugar hit to the budget, but we have paid for this decision for decades to come. I truly believe in that, when you are delivering services to vulnerable people, whether in disability, aged care, people looking for work or prisons.

I think the Northern Territory is organising to build a private prison; that's their next prison plan. Ultimately, the most vulnerable individual misses out. It's not good public policy when you're dealing with vulnerable people; services should be delivered by the state.