By Kevin Healy
The federal minister for business finance, Ralph, came up with a scintillating piece of economic logic this week. You'll remember how the government made this brilliant deal a while ago when it got a windfall for the public purse by introducing a competitor for Telecom as well as meeting an important ideological gap in our True Blue Aussie With the Big Red Heart telecommunications distribution.
The competitor bought Aussat, the failed satellite authority which everyone back then except little Johnny Buttons 'n' Bows could see was going to lose money faster than Bondy, John Sellingit Smellingit and the Victorian government put together. Optus got Aussat, but the government got this great idea to help the public coffers. The government would retain the Aussat debt, run up by this time to an insignificant 800 and something million, but — being hard headed about these things — sold Aussat to Optus for a significant 800 and something million. The end result for the public coffers: zilch.
Now this week Ralph came up with another brilliant plan. Quaintarse, having been amalgamated with True Blue Aussie Airlines, is ripe to be flogged off so that it can be more efficient. It has a high debt-to-equity ratio, but it's estimated the government could get 2-3 billion for the amalgamated airlines.
Ralph's brilliant idea, which he announced at an aviation conference in Sydney, is that the government would buy out 1.1 billion of the Quaintarse debt. Then it could sell it and make something close to what it got for the Telecom rival.
Isn't it wonderful and responsible how they deal with our property! And of course we all recall giving Joannie Learner and David Whitewash and Ralph and Paul and all of them a mandate to flog off anything the public owns that moves and makes a quid.
Speaking of David Whitewash — architect of flogging off our electricity authority to the far more efficient private sector and stitching up the appropriate government grants, subsidies, tax breaks, handouts and guarantees — he picks up the cherished and highly respected They Don't Even Blush Award for his attack on the opposition's privatisation proposals.
"Our experience with the sale of Loy Yang B", David warned all Victorians, whose property he has been so vigilant a guardian of, "indicates that power prices would rise if a large proportion of power assets were sold".
Stunned amazement. Can this be true? Isn't the private sector much more efficient? Apparently not. The more you sell, the greater the pressure on prices, David warned. It was hard to see how the opposition could reach its privatisation target without "allowing prices to rise sharply". Can you remember David making these points when he was flogging off Loy Yang B and ordering the unions to cop new conditions and work for Lindsay Foxy or else? Neither can I. But he probably said it and warned us against what he was doing, but the press just forgot to report those bits.