The dangers of the sell-off

A new year has begun but not much has changed apart from the date on the cal­en­dar.

In Aus­tralia, that far­away land that has the rep­u­ta­tion of a kind of par­adise ac­cord­ing to some peo­ple here in Cat­alo­nia, the na­tional gov­ern­ment is up to its usual dirty tricks. Some­one work­ing at the pub­lic's ex­pense re­cently dis­cov­ered a sixty six year-old grand­fa­ther named Mark Rogers who the gov­ern­ment so­lic­i­tor is threat­en­ing with legal ac­tion if he doesn't close down a web­site he runs.

His al­leged crime? Not cor­rup­tion, child-pornog­ra­phy or even de­fraud­ing bank cus­tomers.

Rogers, vol­un­teer­ing his own time, dares to host “savemedicare.org” in an at­tempt to keep the Aus­tralian health sys­tem in pub­lic hands. The ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Turn­bull gov­ern­ment down-under has told “Grandpa Mark” that he has bro­ken copy­right law through 'mis­lead­ing or de­cep­tive' use of the Medicare “brand” logo.

The fact that Medicare ex­ists not as a brand but as a tax­payer-funded or­gan­i­sa­tion which is re­spon­si­ble for al­lo­cat­ing re­sources to hos­pi­tals has been ig­nored by the Aussie media. What they have rightly pointed out though is that the gov­ern­ment is falsely using the law to in­tim­i­date a critic of their pol­icy of sell­ing off Medicare to cor­po­ra­tions with big prof­its from sick­ness as their sole mo­tive. Rogers aim is sim­ply to keep the uni­ver­sal health sys­tem for all and to pub­li­cise the myths that right-wingers in Aus­tralia are spread­ing about Medicare being sup­pos­edly 'un­af­ford­able.'

Mean­while back on this half of the globe, in a pro­gres­sive move the Sloven­ian par­lia­ment has adopted a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment that de­clares their coun­try's abun­dant clean water sup­plies are 'a pub­lic good man­aged by the state' and 'not a mar­ket com­mod­ity.'

Strangely though, the same cen­tre-left gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to em­ploy pri­vate se­cu­rity firms to help “man­age the flow of thou­sands of mi­grants and refugees” trav­el­ling through the coun­try to­ward north­ern Eu­rope.

If con­tract­ing out po­lice work seems a rea­son­able idea, I would urge you to read British jour­nal­ist Polly Toyn­bee's won­der­ful book about life for the low-paid (ti­tled “Hard Work.”) She spent time in var­i­ous jobs where, amongst many other shock­ing dis­cov­er­ies, she found that all across their Na­tional Health Ser­vice, pri­vate agen­cies were orig­i­nally used to solve short term staffing but quickly be­came de­pen­dent on them.

The agen­cies were quick to re­alise this re­la­tion­ship of de­pen­dency so col­luded to keep push­ing up their fees with­out pay­ing staff any more than sub-liv­ing wage rates. As a re­sult, pub­lic ser­vice 'man­agers' were com­pletely un­able to man­age their teams be­cause they were all being di­rectly em­ployed by com­pa­nies out­side the sys­tem.

This has been a busi­ness arrange­ment that only ben­e­fit­ted the com­pa­nies. And it has now been true for a decade and a half, leav­ing tax­pay­ers as well as the gov­ern­ment and these low-paid work­ers trapped with­out a trace of value for money - the exact thing that pri­vati­sa­tion is sup­posed to be so good for.