By Margaret Gleeson

SYDNEY -- Amid unprecedented scenes of booing and heckling of a premier, delegates at the NSW ALP annual conference in Sydney on October 4 gave the thumbs down to the plan of Bob Carr and treasurer Michael Egan to sell off the NSW power industry. The sale was to have bankrolled state infrastructure and pork-barrelled Labors re-election.

However, the Carr government is unlikely to accept the conference decision. On October 10 it announced plans to go ahead with a government-funded conference of union delegates on October 30-31.

The delegates' conference was first mooted in a September 16 letter from Egan to all power workers which peddled the line of the committee of inquiry headed by Bob Hogg, an engineer of Labors uranium mining sell-out of the 1980s.

That line is that privatisation is inevitable; competition already makes public ownership of utilities a risky business; the sell-off should proceed immediately, “before competition erodes its value and puts NSW jobs at risk”; and that a Labor government can stitch up a better privatisation deal for workers than the state opposition.

The fact that this “cut-throat competition” was a Keating Labor government initiative was omitted from the Egan letter. Guarantees of job creation sound hollow coming from a politician who had previously promised power unions that corporatisation of the power industry would not lead to privatisation.

Officials in the power industry (including Steve Turner of the Public Service Association, a dissenting member of the Hogg committee) have declared the delegates' conference redundant as a result of the ALP conferences overwhelming opposition to the privatisation.

Meanwhile Energy Australia management has refused to accept the Electrical Trades Unions proposal for the insertion of a clause in the award governing the outsourcing of work to private contractors. It is also refusing to pay an agreed 5% wage increase (from July 1) until the award is finalised.

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