NSW NOT FOR SALE

The McKell Institute estimates electricity prices will rise by $100 a year once the poles and wires are sold.

And when electricity services are cut by storms, or bushfires, the public wants services restored quickly. Private operators will slash staff numbers leaving families waiting longer to have power restored to their homes.

Now, with the campaign off and running, every day Mike Baird is promising new projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars – but only if the poles and wires are sold.

What Baird won’t admit is that selling the network comes at a price, running into billions of dollars. Every year his government spends the $1.7 billion in dividends it receives from the electricity network on schools and hospitals.

What he’s really doing is bringing forward that money, so he can offer a massive infrastructure inducement to voters to return the Liberals to power at the election.

But Baird’s privatisation plans go further. Whether it’s our electricity network, our hospitals, our health services, our TAFE system, or our public transport – the fact is this Baird Liberal Government has never seen a public asset they don’t want to sell.

We are seeing the full-scale Americanisation of our public health system with plans underway for a major hospital on Sydney’s Northern beaches, to be built and operated by the private sector. And there will be more.

While much of the state’s TAFE system has already been turned over to private providers, leading to job losses among fulltime TAFE teachers and savage increases in fees for students.

Under the NSW Liberals a two-year diploma in Electrical Engineering, for example, has increased from $3000 to $8000. And this at a time when our youth unemployment rate is one in eight, they need to be investing in jobs and training not ripping them away.

Sending a message loud and clear
In response to the Baird Government’s mass privatisation agenda the NSW union movement has launched a multi-level campaign to send the message loud and clear that ‘NSW is Not For Sale’.

The campaign includes strategic door knocking, phone and digital campaigning, as well as radio and television advertisements.

The undeniable fact is that the people of NSW do not want the Baird Government’s hyper-aggressive privatisation agenda.

It’s about time the NSW Liberals actually listened to the public rather than trying to demonise the union movement for giving voice to the sentiment of workers.