Privatisation speech by Gabrielle de Vietri. Full transcript:
The neoliberal project has failed. Ours is the first generation since the Great Depression to be worse off than our parents. We are in the grip of multiple crises – climate, housing, economic inequality – and it is the government’s job to use the levers that are available to them to shape our future, to curb climate catastrophe, to make housing fair, to bridge the widening gap between the rich and the poor. They do that – we hope – by choosing carefully how they spend our tax money and what they regulate.
But at a time of global unrest, of housing inequality, of looming climate catastrophe,
this Labor government is subsidising Israeli weapons manufacturers.
This Labor government is subsidising private property investors and fossil fuel companies. They are funnelling money into private prisons, they are cutting WorkSafe for injured workers and they are capping wages, but they will not cap rents. They are refusing to make food affordable by regulating the supermarket duopoly. They are missing in action when it comes to making renting affordable. They are refusing to crack down on Airbnb property investors taking homes away from renters. They turn a blind eye to the crimes of the big banks and the gambling lobby.
For anyone who shudders when they hear the name Kennett, it is much more chilling to realise that it is not just Liberal governments that we need to be worried about – full-scale privatisation is every bit on the Labor agenda too. The Port of Melbourne, the Land Titles Office and VicRoads licensing and registration have all been privatised. Labor has continued the Liberals’ privatisation of trains and trams, of infrastructure, prisons and tolling, and now Labor is privatising births, deaths and marriages. The department that deals with our most intimate and vital information is on the chopping block in a government review of all the state’s assets for potential privatisation. Guess who is doing the review? Is it the government? No, it is a private investment bank.
This Labor government wants to outsource solving all of its problems to the private market.
They seek short-term cash injections to cover their own hides and leave future governments way down the road to deal with the repercussions.
When a government privatises its services, whether it is selling them off completely or under the guise of a joint venture, a co-investment, asset recycling or a public–private partnership – whatever you want to call it – the functions of those services shift from being in the interests of the public good to being a profit-making project, and, to that end, corners are cut, staff are sacked, accountability plummets and Victorians are left paying more for less. We cannot keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. Leaving it to the market does not work. Trickle-down economics is a scam, and privatisation has benefited only a wealthy few.
We need real solutions. We need a vision.
The Greens’ vision for solving these crises includes accessible public housing for anyone who needs it, built by a public builder and powered by 100 per cent renewable energy from a publicly owned energy retailer or your local community battery and connected to an energy grid that is back in public hands; a good secure public job for anyone who wants it; and tens of thousands more well-paid public jobs in Victoria in renewable energy, building homes, restoring nature, health care and education.
Many of these things we have had before, but they have been sold off by past governments, and last year Labor lifted the last bit of their facade and came right out and told us that they intended to demolish and privatise all 44 remaining public housing towers in the state. Any plan that starts with the demolition of almost 7000 public homes and the displacement of more than 10,000 people in the middle of the worst housing crisis in living memory is not a housing plan, it is a housing disaster. But it gets worse. Labor plans to give up all of this land for private property developers to build majority expensive private apartments – prime inner-city locations. Where we see community, they just see dollars for their property investor donors.
But this is not new.
For years this Labor government has been privatising public housing, handing out public land to private developer mates to turn a mega profit on, and in the process tearing communities apart and decimating our housing ecosystem. Because when we have plentiful, secure, affordable public housing this helps keep the private market in check. It drives down the cost of renting and buying, and it sets the scene for universal housing affordability. And it is not like they do not have the public land or the opportunity to build public housing. This government has sold off hundreds of hectares of public land to private developers in recent years.
In Fitzroy right now, in my electorate, there is one of the biggest opportunities in the inner city for new public housing: almost 3 hectares of public land at the Fitzroy Gasworks site. That is being sold off for 100 per cent private housing, when this Labor government went to two elections promising public housing. The government has not only stopped funding more public housing, but they have even stopped saying the words ‘public housing’, as if the words alone would be a betrayal of their ideology. Instead, they have legislated a new umbrella term, ‘social housing’, which intentionally blurs the line between public and private to distract from their plan to end public housing. Or worse, they refer to ‘affordable housing’, the definition of which, under Labor, is more or less left up to the private developer.
Economic policy is social policy.
Let me tell you now: you cannot be socially progressive and economically conservative. Decades of failed privatisation has proven to us that the market has no ethical driver. Its only language is profit, so it is no wonder that when it is left to set what we pay and who has access to the most fundamental of human needs – food, housing, energy – the result could only ever have been the crises that we are seeing unfold today. Rampant inequality, a struggling workforce, poverty manufactured by political choices and a decimated environment – what is even the point of Labor? We can hardly tell the difference anymore between Labor governments and Liberal governments. So what is Labor’s vision? A state run by corporate interests? More homelessness? Housing stress? Is it underfunded, crumbling public schools? Offshore drilling? Is that what it is? Because that is what we have got under Labor.
Or is it just power with no purpose, whatever funds Labor’s next election? Our vision, the Greens’ vision, is one that winds back Labor’s and Liberals’ neoliberalism, invests in robust public services and creates a climate-safe future where everyone has what they need to live a decent life.
