Power sale: Time for plan CE

BY PAM WALKER
The Iemma Government plan to sell off energy retail licences has been slammed in the eastern suburbs.

Vaucluse MP Peter Debnam described the outcome as a continuing fire sale.

‘It’s still all about Costa trying to get spending power for the next election. I’m pleased we stopped the full sale. Now we need to stop plan B and ask for plan CE ‘ clean energy,’ he said.

‘The debate has been censored by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph. All they’ve covered is the internal politics, not the issue, which is not privatisation but transformation of the industry to clean energy.’

Mr Debnam described Treasurer Michael Costa as ‘an idiot’ and said pressure should be put on the government to get rid of him[see editor’s note]*. ‘People have to realise Costa should be stopped. It’s not achieving anything except selling taxpayer assets at fire sale prices.’

Coogee MP Paul Pearce was among the Labor MPs prepared to cross the floor over the original electricity privatisation proposal.

He does not consider this latest plan a good solution but thinks Plan B – to sell off retail licences and sites but hold on to electricity generation and distribution – a better option.

‘To say those opposed to privatisation are happy with plan B is going too far but I think we can all probably live with it,’ he said. ‘This is a better outcome than where we were because it leaves generators and wires in public hands. The main issue for me was keeping the power stations in public hands and we’ve achieved that.’

But Mr Pearce wants the State Government to hold on to at least one of the three electricity retail licences it owns out of the 23 operating in NSW. Twenty are already controlled by the private sector.

‘We should hold on to one just to keep the other players honest. There is a risk if you sell all the retail licences and they fall in the hands of the owners of the generators. The ACCC thinks [that would] stifle competition,’ he said.

And he said the fight was not over.

‘If they sell the three licences, workers will need protection – energy core centre workers in the country will be especially vulnerable. I think the private sector will shed jobs and working conditions. The USU is working to get protections for the workers; history shows they have real reason to be concerned.’

Mr Pearce said caucus had been urged to rebuild bridges with the unions, a call echoed at meetings of both the right and left factions.

‘I hope the argument is now over. There’s been a certain rending of the party fabric. Morris [Iemma] called for respect for each other’s point of view. He accepted a substantial number of people had a different and genuinely-held point of view. He doesn’t want malice or bad blood which there is likely to be. Someone at some stage will put a knife in someone’s back.

‘Option B with variations was floated in December and February and roundly rejected by Costa. We’ve had nine months of the party tearing itself apart with something that could have been a compromise in December.’

And while the $3billion expected to be raised by the sale will take some pressure off the capital budget and ease interest payments, he said it was ‘obscene that a group of cowboys in New York were dictating policy in Australia’.

Mr Pearce said the AAA rating was not a credit watch in the real sense, but a drop in forward projections resulting from the slowdown in the economy.

The Coogee MP said any suggestion the government should sell off the generators before the introduction of a carbon trading scheme was ‘a fundamentally immoral and totally unacceptable position for a government to take’.

Editor’s Note: *Since this story was published on Wednesday, The NSW State Government has imploded: First Deputy Premier John Watkins resigned; then Treasurer Michael Costa was sacked, and finally, Premier Morris Iemma resigned. Nathan Rees is now Premier and Carmel Tebbutt is his deputy. As Mr Pearce said, the knives were bound to come out!