Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, as we did in the other place, the Greens will be supporting the Government Business (Sale Reforms) Bill 2025. We certainly welcome this bill. It shouldn’t have come to this, of course, and we’re here because in a state of budget distress the Premier announced plans to open up a discussion about privatisation of government businesses. At that time he said the only entity that was off the table was Hydro Tasmania and it was obvious, in part, that was off the table because of the history of an attempted sale of Hydro Tasmania. But there had also been mooted possible sales of the Public Trustee, or the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, or Metro Tasmania, which, I mean who would buy it? For although it performs an essential public service, it’s not a profit‑making entity.
Here we are with a bill that requires a two‑thirds majority of both Houses of parliament to approve the sale of a government business and that is why we welcome this bill because it provides some certainty to Tasmanians who own these businesses. That there’s a rigorous process where parliament will make a determination. Then the question will be put to the Tasmanian people because too often, as we see, a government gets into office and regards public assets as things that it is within their purview to decide to sell without necessarily having a mandate to do so. Most of our GBEs, of course, are well regarded, in some cases loved, but also critical to the wellbeing of people in Tasmania, whether they provide employment or services or critical services such as the delivery of electricity.
Of course, there are some that the Greens are very dubious about and we don’t believe should be government businesses. Within that I would capture Tasmania Racing and Forestry Tasmania. In the case of Tasracing, a heavily subsidised industry that has at its heart – because anywhere animals are being exploited for profit, there is cruelty – cruelty. In successive alternative budgets of the Greens we have defunded Tasracing. Similarly, Forestry Tasmania, is largely propped up by subsidies and contracts that expire in 2027 that heavily subsidise the logging and burning of our forests.
The government also at the time floated the idea of merging some of the government businesses, which is now being pulled off the table. We acknowledge that this bill responds to community concerns. We acknowledge it responds to concerns that have been raised in both Houses of Tasmania’s parliament. We stand with the many workers and, in fact, union representatives who have pushed back on the government’s agenda to privatise these government businesses.
I will at this point give credit to Jeremy Rockliff for having the flexibility of mind to understand he was on a losing wicket. Mind you, that decision to walk away from a privatisation agenda was made in the throat of an election campaign, when sometimes politicians thinking is extremely clarified. Nonetheless, the right decision has been made.
The Unions Tasmania submission to members of parliament, which they sent to us in early July this year, in the election context is really clear. It says ‘time and time again privatisation has led to higher costs, longer wait times and reduced services, especially in regional areas’. Of course, the unions in Australia have a long and bitter experience of understanding that privatisation leads to an erosion of service delivery and invariably increased costs to consumers and often job losses. Privatisation is a failed ideology.
If you want to look at the perfect example of how an agenda to privatise public assets works against the public interest, look no further than the privatisation of water and sewage in the United Kingdom, where all the water in the UK is run by large private corporations whose primary objective is to deliver a return to their shareholders. As a consequence of that, they have not invested in infrastructure upgrades for many, many years and now you have raw sewerage being pumped into the beautiful, and unique to the UK, chalk streams that run all through the United Kingdom. Rivers and streams that people once were able to drink out of and swim in, now you wouldn’t put your toe in as they are so toxic. The flow-on effect of that, quite literally, is that those contaminated waters, which are contaminated by private water and sewage companies, are polluting beaches right around the islands of the United Kingdom. We don’t want to go there.
Of course, this bill does not prevent the sell off of other public assets like public lands. We know that as part of its attempt to generate revenue, this government is looking at parcels of public land, Crown lands, and public buildings for sale in order to top up the budget. The same sort of principle should apply here, where there is a clear understanding that it is a government of politicians, duly elected, no doubt, but trading in public assets often to dig themselves out of a hole that they created. Certainly, in the context of the Tasmanian Budget, here we are, 11 years after the election of the Hodgman Liberal government, where we got a pretty clear understanding of what kind of decisions went into creating the incredibly difficult budget circumstance that we are in. They are all public assets that belong to the Tasmanian people and not to any government and they should remain in public hands.
We’ve seen this government happily lease public land to tourism companies for a peppercorn rent. That’s happening inside our parks and reserves. Perhaps if the government is considering their options for revenue generation, they should consider making companies pay a fair rent for the public land that they make massive profits from, or a fair lease fee for the public waters that, for example, salmon companies profit from.
I was really disappointed in the way the Labor Party conducted itself on this piece of legislation in the other place. Instead of clocking it up as a win for the Tasmanian people, a win for transparency and good governance around the sales of GBEs, a win for the Labor Party that fought hard against the privatisation agenda, we didn’t see that. What we saw was a puerile, in my view, and highly politicised contribution from Labor, which took the opportunity just to hoe into the government, even though, government had responded not only to Labor’s concerns, the Greens’ concerns and the crossbenchers’ concerns, but critically to the worries of the people of Tasmania about a privatisation agenda which they hadn’t been consulted about and for which government had no mandate. I encourage Labor to do better. I think because they were so busy playing the politics with this, they didn’t pick up some ambiguity in the bill which the Greens picked up, which has led to the amendments that the government will be tabling and seeking our support to include into the bill today.
I will repeat the question that my colleague and Treasury spokesperson, Vica Bayley, asked on this point in the other place. He said that the establishment of a two thirds majority to sell a GBE is very clear in the legislation. Each part of the act goes through that process where it states at least two thirds of the members of the House pass a motion approving the sale. We understand that there are other provisions at the end of five sitting days after notice of sale was laid before the House, no notice of motion to disapprove the sale is before the House. It’s a disallowable instrument. If no one moves to disallow it, then it’s taken as passed. The last one, (c), if a notice of motion to disapprove the sale is before the House at the end of the period referred to in paragraph (b), then the first of the following occurs, one, the notice is withdrawn, two, the motion is negatived, and three, a further period of five sitting days ends.
It’s the approval, potentially, of a sale through the lapsing of a disallowable instrument. It’s about negativing a disallowable motion. A disallowable motion in both Houses of parliament is tabled and under normal circumstances that would either pass, or not, by a simple majority. We wanted to be sure that all doubts were removed and that the intent of the bill, which is that any proposed sale of a government business must first be approved by a two thirds majority of both Houses of the parliament. As the bill was drafted, there was a potential ‘out’ clause. So we initially drafted some amendments that were threaded through these provisions in the act that would have – in the proposed section 20A(2) – left out that subsection which created that ambiguity around the disallowable instrument being disapproved, and insert instead the following subsection:
(2) For the purposes of this section an amendment to, or repeal of section 20(1) is approved by at least two‑thirds of the members of a House of parliament if at least two‑thirds of the members of the House pass a motion approving the proposed amendment or repeal of section 20(1).
When we raised it in the House of Assembly, minister Abetz wasn’t sure that there was a problem there and we put forward our amendments to government in the spirit of cooperation ‑ which is how often things get done faster and better – and we’re very pleased to see that the government has recognised there’s some ambiguity there and has brought forward amendments of its own.
But it’s a lesson, I think, to Labor. Spend a little bit less time playing the politics and a bit more time having a look at the guts of the bill before you. Do the work on the legislation which the Greens do every time. You owe it to the people who put you in this place.
We’re pleased to support this bill. We’re pleased that the government will move its own amendments to remove that ambiguity around the disallowable instrument in the bill. I look forward to further contributions from honourable members on a matter which is of great public interest to the people of Tasmania who own our GBEs and state‑owned companies.
