It is a distraction in itself that when watching a New South Wales leaders debate, both the NSW premier, Mike Baird, and his opposition, Luke Foley, are good performers – unlike their federal counterparts.
If that is not enough, they have a really big reform to argue over, which involves all the issues future governments have to face up to; the economic and environmental sustainability of the power network.
On the sale of the electricity infrastructure, they stand at opposite ends. Mike Baird is staking his all on a 49% sale of “poles and wires”. Luke Foley is opposed. The unions are knocking on doors. Street by street.
Gone is the me too-ism of 2013 that marked Tony Abbott’s campaign. Baird is not standing on a platform of taking away policies. He is placing a big fat one in the middle of the table for NSW voters to chew on.
As a result, Friday’s debate centred on Baird’s privatisation agenda. Baird used Labor heavyweights Paul Keating and former minister Martin Ferguson who have backed his privatisation plan.
“It’s not just me, it’s that report, it’s the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission], Rod Sims, it’s Paul Keating, Martin Ferguson,” Baird said. “Martin Ferguson came out today and said he was ashamed of NSW Labor for this dishonest campaign.
“The facts show that the bills in South Australia and Victoria are lower when private sector has come in and in our plan we maintain public ownership and we just lease out 49% and we put that into new assets and we own both.”
The difficulty for Baird is that according to polling, his constituents are not very keen on privatisation, which is why the statement above has changed a little since the start of the campaign.
The premier is now emphasising that it is not a sale of assets, rather, a leasing of the assets. For 99 years. A point Luke Foley picked up on.
“Mike’s been spruiking privatisation of electricity since the month he became premier,” Foley said. “A week ago he switched to saying, ‘Oh, everything will stay in public ownership’.
“There’s four state-owned electricity businesses on the line here. Transgrid, the transmission network, he’ll sell 100%. Two of the three distributors he’ll sell majority control. That is a privatisation, but he can’t and won’t call it a privatisation anymore, having said it’s his signature policy for the first nine months of his premiership. It’s now the policy he runs away from.
“I’m not an ideologue. For me what matters is what works. We’re talking about the monopoly part of the network. You can’t run two sets of poles and wires down every street in the state.
“You can only have one. It’s a licence to print money.”
The $20bn sale tag for poles and wires mean it is also a licence to print promises and Baird has been rolling them out across the state, for infrastructure including roads, public transport, hospitals, water and schools. No corner of the state is forgotten.
Which has allowed Baird to press Foley on how Labor would fund their more modest $10bn infrastructure plan. Labor has said it will defer business stamp duty tax cuts, among other things. Baird called the deferral a new tax.
“They’re not new taxes, they’re existing taxes that Mike once has deferred the abolition of,” Foley said. “And if Mike went to his good friend Tony Abbott and got him to reverse his unfair $25bn of cuts to our schools and hospitals, we could abolish those stamp duty taxes tomorrow.”
As you would expect in these tough times for Abbott, Foley dropped the prime minister’s name into the debate several times. Abbott is a friend of Baird’s and his electorate crosses over the premier’s Manly electorate.
Coal seam gas also got a run even though no government’s hands are clean on the issue. Labor issued all of the current licences and the Coalition have pressed on with them, in the face of fierce community opposition.
Foley appeared stronger on committing to a moratorium on CSG licences until the recommendations of the chief scientist are in. Baird said he was buying some licences back, though so far, his government has chosen less controversial and mostly unused licences.
This was one of the last debates before the election, which is just two weeks away on 28 March. Baird is ahead in the polls and looked like a confident leader. So while Foley performed well, he has yet to overcome the lack of recognition from being in the job just two months.
The Liberals remain quietly confident that they will win this poll, which without the privatisation issue, they would expect to win easily.
The upper house remains the space to watch. As Baird pointed out in the debate, no government has had control of the upper house for the past 20 years. But when asked what he would do if he could not get privatisation through the upper house, Baird simply said he expected he would.
Yet with challenges from independents, minor parties and the Greens, not to mention the inevitable swing back to Labor after the landslide of 2011, hubris is perhaps not the best strategy.
Perhaps he could consult his good friend Abbott on the joys of the Senate.
