SA bill to give parliament privatisation veto powers

September 11, 2022

The Labor Government's support for The State Assets (Privatisation Restrictions) Bill 2022 in the legislative council last week paves the way for its passage through the lower house. 

The bill would give the Parliament the opportunity to vote down any attempts from government to privatise public assets. 

The bill, introduced by Greens MLC Robert Simms was supported by the government and cross bench MLCs in a great example of cooperative legislative approaches.

Unsurprisingly, the Liberals were not supportive of the bill. Liberal MLC Heidi Girolamo said, “privatisation is not always the enemy”.

SA Unions are pleased to see the incoming Labor government following through on their pre-election promise that "any further privatisation of public services will be banned.”

"Unions have been fighting privatisation for years. A Parliamentary vote alone won't prevent it from happening, but it will allow for greater public scrutiny and that's something we'd all welcome."

"We've seen how much of a dog's breakfast selling ETSA turned out to be, if this legislation was in place in 1999, we'd have much cheaper power bills now."

"It's crystal clear that not only is privatisation bad for our community, but it's also not electorally popular either. South Australians elected the Malinauskas Labor Government with a mandate of bringing trains back into public hands, with no further privatisations."

"If the Liberal party truly believe that 'privatisation is not always the enemy' then they should have no problem with putting the argument for any examples of 'friendly privatisation' in our State Parliament, instead of behind closed doors with billionaires."