Commission of Audit’s Tony Shepherd
The federal Budget announced today is tearing up the social contract. Jack Rozycki has some ideas on how it has all come to pass.
Why, when it has a city full of long-serving public servants in Canberra who have been doing this and nothing else for a very long time? Why call up these gatecrashing outsiders? What do they bring to the table that the public servants do not?
Special interests, that’s what. What guarantee do we have that the mob “advising” Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are different to the cheats and crooks who tried so hard to pick our pockets in NSW? They too stalk the corridors of power to shill their special interests. The quid pro quo has already been paid in generous donations to the Liberal Party, but we will never know how and how much because federal donations are hidden from the public’s gaze and there is no federal ICAC to unearth them.
Tony Shepherd heads the national Commission of Audit that was set up to inform the Budget. Here are his qualifications to advise Abbott on why you should be paying the doctor a $6 to $15+ co-payment for each visit:
• Shepherd has been president of the Business Council of Australia since November 2011.
• Serves as vice president of the Australian Council of Infrastructure Development Ltd.
• Served as chief executive of Transfield’s Project Development Division and was responsible for Transfield Holdings’ entry into the Build-Own-Operate (BOOT) market with the Sydney Harbour Tunnel project, 1992- 2001.
• He joined Transfield Holdings Group in 1978. Has been commercialising public infrastructure in South-East Asia.
• He chaired the winning bid consortium for the Lane Cove Tunnel Project in Sydney, and we know what a disaster that was: Sydney’s Lane Cove Tunnel went into receivership with a $1.1 billion bond debt. Yet, the Lane Cove Tunnel owners received a $25 million compensation package from the NSW government– the massive payout was negotiated in 2006 when Labor’s Eric Roozendaal was roads minister.
• Shepherd has been involved in many privatisations of public infrastructure, the so-called BOOT projects, such as Geoff Kennett’s Melbourne CityLink and the redevelopment of Walsh Bay.
• At Transfield Holdings (now the new jailer at Manus Island, taking over from where G4S left off) he was the boss of project development.
• He was director of ConnectEast Group, another private infrastructure group involved in buying up public assets.
• He was chairman and sometime director of Videlli Ltd from 2003 to 2005. Videlli was a company trying for a private transport ticketing contract but was unsuccessful and was delisted by the ASX. Many shareholders were left holding the empty bag.
Privatising is Shepherd’s big thing. This includes running private jails, gulags and security as director of Thales Australia and Transfield so it’s no wonder he is keen to privatise Medicare and Australia Post, both absolutely necessary to people at the other end of the socio-economic scale.
Shepherd is advising Abbott to rip the heart out of the Australian welfare state. Ho ho. What a surprise. His treasurer Joe is preparing the ground for wholesale strip-mining of public assets. This is where the really big quid will be made – not millions, but billions.
We’ll all be poorer for it; not just pensioners and welfare recipients, but the country as a whole will be thoroughly trashed for a very long time to come because the government actually makes a good income stream to plough into the public purse out of the public assets and enterprises it is now looking to sell. Once sold off it is hard to get them back.
Public, btw, means you and me.
There is less money to pay pensions thanks to the tax breaks and scams for the rich and major corporates, the many foreign multinationals who transfer price to be out of reach of the ATO and fewer money-making government enterprises.
If we privatise public services and assets as recommended by the Commission of Audit – hard won over decades – we could find that Shepherd, his clients, mates and the companies he is associated with are in a position to make a motza – whether that is the intention or not.
It is time, citizens, to get out onto the streets. Fuck this for a joke.
