Greens forum on privatisation

Last night I had the pleasure to MC for a keen audience who listened to the Secretary of Trades Hall Council, Gary Kennedy, and Greens NSW MLC John Kaye speak on privatisation.


Gary spoke about Unions NSW's "Better Services for a Better State" (see my previous post on this) campaign and the local and state union perspective on privatisation, and John (who is a member of the Legislative Council Committee investigating the gentrader affair) talked about Labor's latest privatisation fiasco and the attempts by The Greens parliamentarians in the state parliament to put the brake on Labor's privatisation of our public assets.

Both speakers warned the audience about the threat presented by a future Coaliton government.

In my introductory remarks, I noted that privatisation has been identified as a key issue for The Greens in Newcastle, and pointed to some of the local privatisation issues under the current Labor government, including:

• the public support by the Member for Newcastle, Jodi McKay, of the Iemma government's attempt to privatise the NSW electricity industry in 2008
• the attempt (wonderfully foiled by a grassroots community campaign) to privatise the Wallsend Aged Care facility
• the Newcastle Coastal Revitalisation Masterplan, which proposed significant privatisation of Newcastle's public beaches and coastal parks and is vigorously promoted by Ms McKay
• the current proposal for a large private function centre at the former King Edward Park Bowling Club site.

I also mentioned that fact that Newcastle Council's Local Environmental Plan (which zones all the land in the Newcastle council area) is currently being developed under the state government's new template instrument, which requires councils to strip these planning instruments of the local requirements that communities have developed over the years, and replace them with a template imposed by the state government.

One feature of this "cookie cutter" approach is the requirement to zone public facilities such as schools according to their adjacent land-use, which makes them sitting ducks for any future government that might want to sell-off such land. Until this approach was imposed, these facilities have been zoned "special uses", so that any proposal for the land to be used for some other purpose had to go through a formal rezoning process, providing local communities with the opportunity to engage in a proper discussion about the best use of the land.

Now, such proposals would simply go directly to the development application stage, with the whole land-use issue a legal fait accompli.

The audience raised many excellent questions and points following the two set speakers.

I'm sure it won't be the last we hear about privatisation in this local campaign - on this blog, in the media, and at the various candidate forums between now and 26 March.

You can see Unions NSW's video on the Better Services campaign here: