Privatizing infrastructure is not necessarily a bad thing. Competition in telecoms is a net benefit to society. However, there needs to be minimum service standards.
For instance, with telephones, there was redundancy for electric failure. However with nbn there isn’t. It’s especially a problem where you have outages like Optus where someone might rely on them for phone, internet and mobile service, in face being incentivised to do so. At least with mobile, there is redundancy of 000 calls through any network. We should look at how we can do similar. For instance, in the event of an Internet outage, a code could be entered into eftpos terminals to accept offline payments for 24 hours or similar. Sure, there is a higher risk of fraud for this period, but that’s better than no commerce.
If the infrastructure is publicly owned it won’t be seeking a profit or to please shareholders, only the Australian people, so prices will be lkw anyway. The it also has the possibility to be covered entirely by taxes (at least for some base level plan) since its now an essential service to the economy
Not necessarily. The passport office is publicly owned and we pay some of the highest fees for passports.
The nbn is publicly owned but seeks to make a profit.
Anything that is government owned is paid for by us all anyway, through taxes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But, when things are more expensive to use, but not used by all, it’s fairer. However for essential service, spreading the cost by how much people can afford is also good.
It’s not a case of public good, private badz but there is nuance and pros and cons.
