Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right

And so the highly predictable, depressingly familiar pattern of a “right of centre” conservative regime continues, with Barnett’s mob now intent on privatisation of public services as a “solution”. As reported in The West Online, Colin Barnett and the blue-rinse set have plans to privatise public sector services, in an attempt to rein in spiralling costs.

What a complete and utter load of tosh. On the face of it, privatisation is a very tempting prospect and indeed, it is impossible to argue against the value of adopting private sector principles when contrasted with certain public sector methods. The danger, however, is that services get auctioned off to the lowest bidder, wrapped up in fluffy nonsense about achieving the best balance of service and cost.

Anybody who thinks that decisions will be made on any factor other than cost, quite frankly has rocks in their head.

As I said, the idea of adopting private sector practices is a good one, I myself have argued for more of a private sector style approach in certain situations, but you can bet your life on the fact that this is just another instance of problem avoidance by a conservative administration. You see, when faced with issues of balancing community service delivery and costs of such service provision, your average right-of-centre mob will reach for the “cure all” of privatisation. They spout ideological bullshit about how it will make things more efficient, yet the only thing that REALLY matters to them is that it becomes “someone else’s problem”.

What will follow, if this madness is allowed to go through, is a rapid deterioration in quality of service, and an exodus of staff who are ALREADY pretty pissed off with their lot. This then forms a negative feedback loop until a “white knight” arrives in the shape of a Labour government, they put it all back into public hands, except the bits they really don’t want, followed by 4 years of neglect and underspending from them as well.

Listen up you idiot politicians, keep the public sector in the hands of the state, dump the “nanny state” attitudes, the “let’s go back to the 1950s” attitudes, and instead of simply passing problems around, stand up and actually do something about it.

I predict, however, that all concerned will remain clueless, gutless wonders…