The following articles were published in "The Guardian", newspaper of
the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday, October
16th, 2002.
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Scheme to privatise water
"Slay the Telstra giant" says a headline in Business Review Weekly on
October 2. The article pushes for the privatisation of the remaining
publicly owned 51 percent of the telecommunications provider. At around
the same time a group of billionaire businessmen and a commercial radio
spin doctor were devising a lunatic scheme to control Australia's scarce
water resources, including re-routing the river systems.
by Marcus Browning
The connection between water and telecommunications is not an accident.
The Business Review Weekly article was written by one of the sharks from
the sea of consulting companies eagerly promoting deregulation and the
sell off of all public assets. It is an eagerness motivated by the
promise of share options and huge salary packages, which in this case
would be funded by taxpayers.
The article argued that Telstra's monopoly in telecommunications is
holding Australia back on the brink of the glorious new world order of
corporate globalisation. "How can Australia expect to compete with Hong
Kong and Singapore to attract regional [corporate] headquarters when its
communications services lag?", asks this advisor to the privateers.
Meanwhile, radio mouthpiece Alan Jones was at the Farmhand Foundation
giving off feelgood vibes: "We're seeking to go to the farming community
to encourage them that we're on their side." The privateers get full
marks for propaganda skills.
The Farmhand Foundation was set up by corporate monopoly interests under
cover of helping drought-stricken farmers (see The Guardian #1112).
News Ltd chief executive John Hartigan is a member, as is Consolidated
Press Holdings chairman Kerry Packer. Farmhand's chairman is Bob
Mansfield, who is also chairman of Telstra, appointed by the Howard
Government to oversee the sell-off of the remaining 51 percent.
The privatisation of Telstra is fiercely opposed by rural Australians
and the Government knows it. Rural communities can see the writing on
the wall. They know that its spells the end of their cross-subsidised
telecommunication services. This would result in prices in regional
Australia increasing and services being further degraded.
Farmhand's "drought-proofing" of Australia includes the construction of
water pipelines and changing the course of rivers. Said Packer, who is a
monopoly operator in the meat industry, "I think it's possible for this
country to be a lot better drought proofed than it is at the moment."
Jones ran with a diversion-of-the-rivers line, calling for the tapping
of the Clarence, Burdekin and Daly northern rivers to irrigate dry areas
in the south.
Dire consequences
This scheme, scientifically debunked when put forward previously, was
rejected again by experts. Tom Hatton, senior principal research
scientist with the CSIRO's Land and Water division, warned of the dire
consequences of proposals to "turn the rivers around".
"You can't spread the water around so that the grass is always green",
he said. "If they mean opening up new irrigation areas, then that would
mean pulling new waters out of the environment, and that really is very
fraught."
The Northern Territory Government called the idea of tapping the
northern rivers for massive new amounts of irrigation water "technically
possible" but "economically and environmentally ridiculous."
Putting out some more feelgood vibes, chairman Hartigan intoned, "We are
not only trying to alleviate hardship, but looking to put in some water
policy that is enduring."
Enduring for whom? His philanthropic hot air has about it the stink of
entrepreneurial money grubbing. Who would construct such an elaborate
irrigation system? Who would own them, regulate them, manage them, and
benefit from them by controlling the water supply? The answer is the
corporations with rich subsidies from the Federal government using
taxpayers' money derived from the sale of Telstra.
It should be noted that the individual recruited by the Howard
Government to head yet another investigation into Telstra services in
the bush is a big player from the cotton industry. Dick Estens is a
cotton farmer from Moree in north-west NSW. He, like most of those on
his Telstra inquiry panel, is a member of the National Party.
His millionaire status was in no small part derived from the cotton
irrigators' ruthless and willful exploitation and destruction of the
river systems in north west NSW and south west Queensland. Estens and
his like are the ones set to benefit from Farmhand's water plan.
Alan Jones' program with its "we are on the same side" theme will be
broadcast widely in rural and regional areas. He is a Liberal Party man
and will attempt to allay the fears about a privatised Telstra. Estens'
job is to come up with a rationale for its privatisation, perhaps in the
form of a trade-off for a farm assistance package.
Control of and access to water has historically been a battle between
smaller farms and local communities on one hand and the politically and
economically powerful agri-business interests on the other.
Privatising the water would put the official, legal seal of ownership on
the most essential natural resource of all, outside of the air we breath
(and even that's not beyond the privateers).
Farmhand's water scheme, like the push to privatise Telstra, is against
all common sense and common interests. But to the corporate cutthroats
in pursuit of profits, lunacy appears as logic.
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