Tuesday, 11 August 2026

 Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (15:36): Cabinet documents reveal that the Victorian Labor government has spent the last five years secretly planning to privatise Melbourne Water. Let that sink in. Labor wants to sell off our water system. Letting profit-driven corporations get their hands on our water would be a complete disaster. Just look at what happened in the UK when they privatised water. They have seen skyrocketing bills, water outages, no water coming out of the taps and raw sewage being pumped into rivers and beaches.

The new Premier says that he will not privatise our water, but Labor have said this before and then found even more creative ways to monetise our public assets, like long-term leases, ground lease models and public–private partnerships. They are all a similar thing: they are taking a service that the government run for public benefit and handing it to a corporation to profit from. What do Victorians get in return? The government gets a short-term cash injection to make its balance sheet look a little bit better, but the public gets poorer services and higher costs, and water is just the latest. Labor in Victoria over the last 12 years has sold off or privatised our port, toll roads, public housing, land, the land titles office and VicRoads. In fact Labor has sold off pretty much everything that Jeff Kennett could not. As economist Greg Jericho puts it, neoliberalism has spread through our politics like a cancer, gutting public services in the name of profit. Yet Labor is fully signed up for it. The Greens, however, will always keep public assets in public hands, where they belong.