An anomaly has accrued within the senate, while the Howard government peruse their neo-liberal reforms senators have come forward valuing the needs of their constituency over the party line. Now I hear Whitlam in the background telling me that politics is an honourable profession and so maybe I’ve been to harsh. What then is so interesting about the Barnaby Joyce lead senate revolt?
It’s intriguing because of its timing; the social democrats worse fears were confirmed when Howard gained control of the upper house. It seemed that the sale of Telstra, IR reform, USU reform and god knows what were going to pass and there was nothing they could do. Articles appeared in the ‘labor herald’ describing the role of the parties parliamentarians as ‘critical observes’ and federal labor politician held this line. As if it mattered though the coalition senators could sit back and listen to the greens and labor speakers monologue, they still had their majority. That was until the coalition lost its unity and the nationals showed their free consciousness regarding key issues of the governments agenda.
This fractioning within the coalition is quite unusually, the coalition and particularly the liberals are notorious for party unity and following the leader (though we also have the leadership question). The labor party historically is fractionalised and needs a lot of self-discipline to stop the left faction trying to knife the right faction and vice versa. This means that the issues being debated are of critical importance if coalition senators are willing to break normal protocol to opposed theses reforms.
The major issue which Joyce and the nationals have broken with liberals over is the complete privatisation of Telstra. Joyce has said many times that he opposes the sale of Telstra because it’s not in the interest of “the Queensland people”. But he realises that he can’t block the sale in its entirety and is willing to make a compromise with the liberals. The liberals for their part have proposed a trust fund for rural services which will include one billion dollars to be given immediately to Telstra to upgrade services and a further two billion which would generate one hundred million a year to maintain and upgrade rural services. This is what Nationals Leader Mark Vaile asked for but it is not the five billion asked for by Joyce but he calls it "a quantum leap" and is considering it while he consults colleagues and "the people of Queensland".
The liberal arugment for selling Telstra is that free market enterprise is more efficiency then state run enterprises. But this judgment is being made in the vain of a corporation which has the legal responsibility to maximises its shareholders profits even at the perils of public good. The Liberal party though forms a government which has to ensure the public good reconciling it with private interests which might contradict at times. The value of public enterprises is it allows greater flexibility of goals, it could run at a loss to provide cheap services to the public such as in our public transport systems. Which some might contend is a good thing. But the Howard government doesn’t see this logic and has to be forced to provide funds to maintain services in areas which an unbridled corporation would deem unprofitable and thus discontinue services
There are problems with joint private-public enterprises though and on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of world war two it reminds me of the marshal plan. The marshal plan was the plan for post-war rebuilding of Europe funded through taxes of the American public while wealthy Europeans keep their money in American banks. Sixty years on in Australia we are about to have public funding of private enterprises so those with private interest can have their cake and eat it too.
