Any day now the findings of the special Consultative Reference Committee (CRC), set up by the NSW government to "test the impacts" of its plans to privatise its electricity generation and retailing assets, will become public.
From day one, the members of the committee have had different ideas of its role. Those who are part of the anti-privatisation campaign, like Unions NSW deputy assistant secretary Matt Thistlethwaite, said it could recommend to not proceed with privatisation. But Labor Premier Morris Iemma said the committee's brief was to fine-tune the government's sell-off proposal to make sure that no-one was disadvantaged.
All the pressures of the fight over Iemma's sell-off plan have been centred on the committee, which is composed of six privatisation supporters (Labor MPs Michael Daley and Steve Whan, three public servants and former premier and committee chair Barrie Unsworth) and five privatisation opponents, or likely opponents (Uniting Care's Reverend Harry Herbert, the Total Environment Centre's Jeff Angel, Ben Kruse of the United Services Union, the Public Sector Association's Steve Turner, and Thistlethwaite).
Rumours of possible deals have swirled around the group. Conservative journalist Imre Salusinszky wrote on March 1: "The Weekend Australian understands the committee ... has found there is nothing in the planned sell-off that contravenes Labor's platform ... It is understood that while the Unsworth committee will give the sale overall approval, there will be symbolic concessions to the unions on such matters as pensioner discounts, job guarantees for industry workers and ironclad assurances the poles and wires will not be sold."
However, just five days later Unsworth proposed that the three public generation companies (Delta Electricity, Macquarie Energy and Eraring Energy) and their retail arms be restructured as two separate firms and publicly floated, with workers getting up to $10,000 in shares as an incentive payment to accept the sell-off.
There was an air of desperate improvisation about this move — it directly contradicts the government's claim that it will not be privatising its electricity generation assets but only leasing them. (That line was developed in answer to union objections to past NSW privatisation floats, such as the Cross City Tunnel disaster.)
According to the March 6 Sydney Morning Herald, "One of the state's most senior officials has warned Mr Iemma and his cabinet to 'get into the brace position' because of an inevitable crash landing on privatisation".
On March 7, Salusinszky produced another piece for the Australian ("Big boost for power sell-off") that strongly implied that the union and community representatives on the committee were acquiescing to the position of the committee's pro-privatisation majority. This has been denied, and the union representatives are presently preparing their response to the committee majority.
If they maintain the line contained in Unions NSW's March 5 CRC submission, the conflict with Macquarie Street is only beginning. The submission argued that the Iemma-Costa proposal did not meet 10 of the 12 criteria set down in NSW ALP policy for allowing public asset sales.
It seems certain that the fight can only heat up. The decision of Iemma and his treasurer, Michael Costa, not to wait for the outcome of the NSW ALP's May state conference (almost certain to vote down the sell-off) guarantees this.
The Iemma-Costa tactic is to carry on with the privatisation process as far as possible through regulation — behind the backs of parliament — and only submit those issues to a vote that are unavoidable and those for which they can be certain ALP parliamentary caucus discipline will hold.
But how ALP MPs will vote will be overwhelmingly determined by the active pressure they feel from public opinion. While some, including supporters of privatisation, are already having qualms about voting for bills that directly flout Labor policy, others will happily vote to support privatisation in order to preserve their career paths — provided they can be sure of hosing down the damage with their constituents and rank-and-file ALP members afterwards.
The campaign against the sell-off must intensify the pressure on those ALP members of parliament who support privatisation or are running and hiding. They must be publicly invited to meetings to justify their position and face the opinion of the people.
The campaign needs more public meetings like those called by the Newcastle Trades and Labour Council and the South Coast Labour Council (where the five local Labor members sent apologies and were booed to the rafters). Local groups should also launch petitions demanding that their local MPs who support the sell-off change their stance and line up with the 15 Labor MPs who oppose it.
Such a campaign will also show power workers that the broad public sentiment against privatisation is being mobilised. This is important in building support for the campaign of industrial action that will be needed if and when Iemma and Costa flout ALP policy and the sell-off gets through parliament.
A parliamentary vote in favour of the sell-off, when this issue was not even mentioned during the March 2007 state election, has no legitimacy at all. However, it will not be easy (and did not happen when the Victorian and South Australian power industries were privatised) to carry out a campaign of industrial action against it.
It's vital that the decision of the January Newcastle public meeting to support any industrial campaign by power industry workers — especially the refusal to make information available to private corporations — gets support in meetings across the state.
Many unionists are comparing the campaign against the Iemma-Costa electricity sell-off to the Your Rights at Work campaign that was central to ending the Howard government. But there's a vital difference that we neglect at our peril — there's no way any imaginable NSW government elected in 2011 will reverse privatisation if it gets through now. Certainly the Mike Rann Labor government did not reverse the privatisation of the Electricity Trust of South Australia that was carried out by its Liberal predecessor.
Only the broadest campaign possible, in the community and in the unions, will stop the Iemma-Costa proposal. The Socialist Alliance NSW Trade Union Committee's March 15 seminar "Understanding and Fighting Electricity Privatisation" will be a valuable occasion for planning how to build it. The meeting will be at Redfern Community Centre and will feature Kenneth Davidson (senior Age business columnist), Dr John Kaye (NSW Greens MLC), Thistlethwaite and NSW and Victorian power industry delegates. Phone Bea 0411 614 495 or Alex 0413 976 638 for more information.
[Dick Nichols is the national coordinator of the Socialist Alliance.]