MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (17:20): At the request of Senator McKim, I move: That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency: The need for the Commonwealth Government to urgently intervene against any proposed plans to privatise Australian water supply, including the potential sale of Melbourne Water by the Victorian Labor government.
In the 1980s, Labor commenced one of the largest privatisation programs in the world and, since then, Australia has been systematically privatising almost every essential service that we've got. In the ensuing decades, Labor and the Liberals, state and federal, sold off nearly $250 billion in public assets. Every sell-off led to job cuts, higher prices for all of us and profits for the big corporations created by the government.
The states sold off the electricity companies, and the price of our household bills went up. The government decided to hand the reins to the housing crisis over to property developers and private investors and stopped building public housing. Now the waiting list for public housing is almost 200,000 families long and tents are popping up in parks across the country as people are priced out of rentals.
Next on Labor's hit list appears to be Melbourne Water. In August this year, secret cabinet documents revealed the Victorian Labor Party has spent five years secretly examining the privatisation of Melbourne Water under a project codenamed Project Nerva, with then premier Jacinta Allan and senior ministers approving a 12-month business case in 2024 to bring private investors into water infrastructure worth almost $18 billion.
The current Victorian Premier, Ben Carroll, also argued in favour of the plan. Melbourne Water isn't just about what comes out of Victorians' taps. It manages major catchments, reservoirs, water treatment infrastructure, waterways, stormwater and flood management right across Melbourne.
Without water, we're cooked. This is not something that you hand to the highest bidder. Victoria has a long history of selling or leasing public assets.
The Port of Melbourne was leased for $9.7 billion. The VicRoads registration business was sold for around $7.9 billion. The land titles registry was sold for around $2.9 billion.
Australia, as a nation, has an even longer one—Telstra, CommBank and Qantas. We have seen this film before. Every time an essential service gets privatised, people quite literally pay for it.
The price goes up and the quality of service goes down. In 1989, England and Wales became the only countries to fully privatise their water supply and sewerage, with the goal of attracting private capital that the government itself couldn't borrow. Decades later, the sector is widely seen as a cautionary tale due to steep price rises, infrastructure degradation and indebted private owners refusing to do the work to fix the infrastructure.
Water bills are out of control, rising 36 per cent on average in recent years. But it is sewage spills that have become the most visible failure. Thames Water alone saw a 34 per cent year-on-year increase in serious pollution incidents.
One local council reported 27,400 hours of raw sewage discharged into its rivers in a single year, a 25 per cent rise on the year before. Well done, Maggie Thatcher! There is now an active UK campaign to renationalise their water.
Privatisation has failed, and it is a failure that is shared by both of the major parties. Airports, ports, electricity, telecommunications, banks, toll roads—Labor and the Liberals have been selling off everything that isn't nailed down, and every time we've all ended up paying more for less. That's what we mean when we say that the major parties are selling you out for corporate profit.
It's not a slogan. It is who they are working for. Here's the part that should really worry you.
At the same time they're quietly planning to sell off our water, they're waving through AI data centres across our major cities that will guzzle enormous amounts of water and electricity. What do you think that does to your water or electricity bill? No wonder people are fed up.
The major parties aren't running this system for you. They're running it for big corporations and billionaires. While One Nation points the finger at migrants, they take the money from exactly the same corporations and billionaires.
Public services like water should stay in public hands and run for people, not for profit. We call on the federal government to commit to intervene against any proposal to privatise our water supply.