NZ is not alone in facing a concerted drive towards privatisation. It is already well entrenched in Australia and the latest struggle is to save public ownership of New South Wales’ electricity system. We solicited this short article from Sydney trade union activist, Denis Doherty. Ed.

The historic and significant defeat of the Howard Liberal reactionary Federal government and its anti-union laws on November 24 th, 2007 was still glowing in hearts of the progressive people of New South Wales when they received a “rude shock”. The NSW State Labor government announced in December 2007 that it would sell off its electricity assets to private interests (as in NZ, the NSW electricity industry has been broken up into generation, transmission and retail. What the State Labor government is trying to privatise are the generation and retail sectors. Ed.).

The privatisation of electricity was an idea and policy that had been around for many years. The Liberal (equivalent to the NZ National Party. Ed.) NSW government in the 80’s announced it would privatise electricity and lost the next election because of it. More recently still the immediate past Labor Premier, Bob Carr, proposed to privatise electricity but backed down in the face of massive union pressure and pressure from his Party’s conference.

The present NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, organised an Inquiry into Electricity in NSW headed by Professor Owen, which gave its findings around December 2007. The Owen Report, even though it was not about privatisation per se, it did open the discussion or the “softening up” process. The NSW government proudly proclaimed, in a press release from Iemma: “One of the most significant issues facing NSW into the future is how we secure our energy supplies.The Owen Inquiry into electricity found that NSW would need additional baseload generation capacity by 2013-14. In other words, we have to act now to keep the lights on in NSW.That left the Government with two choices.Spend billions of dollars on new baseload power stations or encourage greater private sector involvement in the electricity market and use those billions of dollars on other infrastructure”.

The union movement, aware of what was going on, contributed a submission to the Inquiry by Professor Sharon Beder (several of whose books have been reviewed in Watchdog. Ed.). This document is a very eloquent and detailed rejection of electricity privatisation anywhere and especially in NSW. All this had no effect and the Government continued to press ahead with its privatisation plans. By this time the battle lines were firmly drawn and the union movement was gearing up for a fight. The campaign was called “Stop The Sell Off”. This campaign was accompanied by strikes, rallies and visiting of local politicians. The union movement in NSW dusted off its community-union groups called Your Rights at Work which had been so effective against the Howard government.

There were many moves to ameliorate the workers and unions involved. There were promises of good redundancies, some training for new careers and so on. Still the union movement led by John Robertson, Secretary of Unions NSW, refused to accept electricity privatisation. Amid this entire clamour the Government announced an inquiry headed by a former Premier Barrie Unsworth, a long time former union official and a dedicated member of Labor’s Rightwing faction. His task was to decide whether the privatisation was in line with “Australian Labor Party (ALP) policy”. Surprise, surprise, he found that it did!

Still the campaign raged up till May 1, 2008. May Day (celebrated on Saturday May 3) in Sydney coincided with the ALP State Conference and a huge crowd rallied outside the Conference against privatisation. The vote was taken and the Conference voted 700 against and 100 for privatisation. Various speeches from the NSW government Ministers at that Conference were extremely offensive and personally insulting to those opposed to privatisation. Morris Iemma declared at the end of the Conference that he had to govern for ALL people of NSW not the ALP or the unions.

Campaign Flaw : It Has Become An Internal ALP Debate

The stage is now set for a huge argument about the power of the Parliamentary wing and the membership of the party. Since May the campaign has not moved, it seems locked and not much is happening but behind the scenes there must be much pushing and shoving. The union movement has persuaded enough MPs to cross to floor to vote against privatisation and Iemma is considering teaming up with the Liberals to get the legislation through the Parliament. No one side can say that it has achieved a result at the time of writing (August).

Of course there are several significant figures in the ALP who are totally in support of the privatisation of electricity, such as former Premiers, and the former Prime Minister (Paul Keating) as well as the current ALP Federal government, are part of this group. The powerful business lobbies are fully in support of the privatisation, such as the local Chamber of Commerce. August 16 was designated as “Super Saturday” when all the elements of the union movement were called on to create events in their areas about electricity privatisation.  

Finally, the campaign has suffered from serious flaws. It has lacked highlights as the Government keeps announcing a date for a step towards privatisation and then changes or moves that date. The Government is still preparing to privatise by doing administrative things not requiring Parliament. The fact that campaign has become an internal ALP debate between the membership and the Parliamentary party has led to some lack of focus. The trade union leadership is struggling with their loyalties to their members and their membership of the ALP. The union leadership knows that a destabilised NSW ALP government will lead to a conservative anti-union Liberal government. Speaking as a member of both a union and a Your Rights At Work group there does seem to be a loss of impetus and drive in the campaign against privatisation of electricity.

In September 2008 the Labor Party dumped Morris Iemma as State Premier. His ideological zeal to privatise NSW’s electricity sector was a major factor in his downfall. Ed.

For further details http://www.stoptheselloff.org.au