ON THE WALLABY- 24th April 2006

OI- HOW COME WE’RE SELLING THE SNOWY MOUNTAINS SCHEME?

That the legacy former NSW Premier Bob Carr has left the State in the form of near bankruptcy and his “sell outs” to Big Business is apparent to most residents and observers and the chances are that his successor, Premier Morris Dilemma, will reap the just rewards of that incompetence.

Which is what has me so snarly about the moves by NSW and other States to sell out the Snowy Mountains Scheme and “privatise” it in the interests of their constituents.

One word about that – bullshit!!

As one of their “constituents”, I am getting awfully angry about Ministerial incompetence, from the AWB fiasco down to the Sydney Cross City Tunnel and the way the public, you and me, are being played for suckers every time.

Maybe it hasn’t yet dawned on Premier Dilemma and others that the most valuable commodity in the world, now and certainly into the future, is not oil but water.

Oil we can live without. Water we can’t and you can, as the late race caller Ken Howard used to say “bet London to a brick” that the money men in Macquarie Bank and other “wealth generators” have certainly done so.

State Treasurer John Della Bosca, at a public meeting held at Cooma last week, said “that the real issues were the best use of taxpayers money and the need for Snowy Hydro to be able to get capital to spur growth”.

Gee, what about the $1 billion a sale would supply to cover up Carr/Dilemma’s financial debacle- that not a point?????

I know it is cynical but the M2 affair also sticks in my throat here. Built at a cost of about $600 million by private enterprise, it gets sold a few years later for over $2 billion. Nice profit when you can get it eh?

Why wouldn’t that road, and others, have been built by government and be owned by the people.

I can hear the replies now “oh well, government is not good at running those things”.

What a lot of rot. Just because you change a letterhead and a trading name from the Department of whatever to Ducks Guts Pty Ltd does not make an enterprise more efficient-and it is efficiency we are talking about here for efficiency equates to profit or lack thereof.

How are you going to like it when, in probably a short time, the shortage of water is seen by all and it is in the hands of Big Business?

They will charge like a wounded bull and do handsomely from the transaction and we, the people who also once owned Telstra, will wonder how come it happened.

Which will be a question simply answered by saying “we let it happen”!!

If you would like to join me in the fight to keep the Snowy in our hands, please email me back and depending on the support, we can go from there.

Carpe diem

Tony

Tony Fountain

Professional Speaker, auctioneer and author

Sydney NSW Australia

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