By Bob Rafto
One thing about the good old days is that if you remember them you are getting long in the tooth. (Now that’s a term you don’t hear much of these days and I suppose it belongs to the era of the good old days).
The good old days for me is the late sixties to the late seventies when I was young and reckless and trying to drown myself in decadence on the weekends (but that’s another story).
The good old days that I’m referring to are those days that the politicians are trying to drag us back to.
I would define the good old days as the post war era right up to the ’91 recession (we had to have) and again during the Howard years – with all the handouts and the property boom.
And I agree that we should go back to the good old days. They were prosperous, jobs were easy to get even at an unemployment rate of 8% which was about the norm (and didn’t Premier Peter Beattie get howled down when he stated he will get the Queensland unemployment rate down to 5% and he did achieve it … as did the rest of Australia).
The question that has to be asked is; “What underpinned the good old days which made them good?”
A complex question to be sure and I’m not qualified to give a definitive answer, however, the glaring contrast of the good old days and to the present is that there was no privatisation of public utilities and infrastructure.
The politicians told us to expect lower prices when they privatised our asset,s and instead we have witnessed price gouging. One only has to look at the electricity sector for evidence of that. Another question that has to be asked is; “How much cheaper would electricity be if it was in government’s hands?”
Not only has privatisation of our utilities been an utter dismal failure, I would venture to say it has been a drag on the economy, and to illustrate this point let’s look at the electricity sector. It has been chopped up into pieces with middle-men and retailers laying claim to these pieces and they’re all trying to maximise profits.
Without these middle-men – and since the government does not need to make an excessive profit – the price of electricity at an estimation would drop by 25% or more. (It’s a ‘guesstimation’, of course)..
Now if the average household bill is $500 a quarter, deduct 25% off this of privatisation’s profits, and this equates to a saving of $125 (or $500 a year).
I said privatisation is a drag on the economy, that household saving of $500 a year would undoubtedly would be spent in local shops and businesses – like in the good old days – but now instead these excessive profits are lining the pockets of the electricity companies and their shareholders. And that is a drag on the wider economy.
The only way we can get back to the good old days is to buy back all the public utilities that have been privatised and that will lead to lower prices and consumers will have more money to spend across the board and that will undoubtedly lead to more employment and other benefits.
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