Economic rationalism to blame for higher costs

LAST week I read in Shane Charles’ article “Government needs to get on with national energy policy” that “...it is hard to understand what on earth is going on.”

Today I read Coles’ boss, John Durkan, saying that “average families - and especially those on low incomes - were even having to trade off buying healthy food as they balanced higher power costs with slow wages growth”.

Energy supply (and water, roads, and postal services) has ceased to be a public service and is now a commodity. Governments and owners involved in the energy industry are simply price gouging and mismanaging.

Those old enough to remember know that when energy (and water, roads, and post) were public services they were fairly affordable and reliable. Now they are neither.

Why? Simple - economic rationalism and greed. In economic rationalist policy public services are declared to be commodities and flogged off to the private sector. The argument is that the private sector can always do things more efficiently.

We’re not supposed to ask how they do that while adding their profit to the cost of delivery. Recent evidence indicates that those public services that have been privatised are either failing or price-gouging to make a profit.

Additionally the user-pays philosophy has simply been asserted and applied. The only justification given is, “Those who use it should pay for it”.

It sounds plausible doesn’t it, so long as we don’t think about it too much.

Do the energy and resources industries and lobbyists happily pay their taxes or the whole cost of the their infrastructure? Hardly. They fight everything.

Now we’re told “we need government to stop bickering, set some policy platforms and get out of the way so that industry can do what it does best - innovate, adapt and move forward”.

For three decades government has given industry what it wanted economic rationalism. What has industry done best? Run up often crippling debt and persuaded consumers to do likewise; exported entire industries overseas and casualised the workforce; and has the audacity to lecture the community about what is best for it.

Those who are supposed to know are increasingly saying that Australia’s two-decades-long dream run of prosperity looks like it’s run its course. Never-the-less, industry feels that, having shown the community how to create unsustainably debt-fuelled prosperity, it is still qualified to lecture the community about what is best for it.

Having buggered the energy sector, industry presumes to blame the politicians (who gave them what they wanted) and consumers (those who go solar). Industry continues talking as though they know how to fix what they broke.

Out here in voter and consumer land we’re fed up with being lectured by the breathtakingly high-handed people who created the problems.