MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (17:14): There was a time when governments understood their job and who they are here to serve. They built homes. They built and ran electricity-generation assets and poles and wires networks.

They owned banks. They owned insurers. They owned airlines.

They built the roads. They built the railways. They built the ports.

They built the infrastructure that was actually a significant part of building this country. They did it because there are some things that are too important to be built and run for profit. Then, after that, came the great sell-off: Labor governments and coalition governments privatising public assets built with the blood, sweat and tears of everyday Australians.

They were selling them off for profit, handing them over, often at bargain basement prices, to corporations so the profits could flow into the private sector. Australians were promised that, through privatisation, they would get lower prices, they would get better services, and they would get greater efficiencies. But what did they actually get?

They got higher bills. They got higher tolls. They got higher fees, worse services, insecure jobs and call centres no-one can reach.

Executives were paid multimillion-dollar annual salaries while ordinary people paid the price through increases in their bills. The privatisation experiment has been an unmitigated disaster. They took that assets that we collectively built, that we collectively paid for and that we collectively owned and ran, and they turned them into machines for extracting profit from all of us.

The consequences are everywhere you look. Governments now pretend they're powerless to fix the problems that they created by selling off public assets. They outsource responsibility.

They hire more consultants from the private sector to try and tell them what to do. They subsidise corporations and then they shrug when costs keep going up and the standard of services keeps declining. We need to take back what we built, and we need to take back what we used to own.

Most of all, we need a government with the courage and the capacity to govern because this country was built by the Australian people on the basis of this land that was stolen from First Nations people, and we need to make reparation for that. (Time expired) The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Neill ): The question is that the motion moved by Senator Waters be agreed to.