On 18 Aug 2026, I gave a Speech on Public Ownership
Transcript:
Ms WATSON-BROWN:
I proposed this MPI today because Australians are being ripped off, and we’re in this mess because of decades of bipartisan agreement between Labor and the Coalition on handing our essential services over to private corporations.
Who else thinks that private energy retailers are pointless middle men? Scam artists, even?
Ticket clippers?
Origin, AGL, Alinta, EnergyAustralia - we have over 40 electricity retailers in Australia. But they’re all selling the same energy, from the same grid.
Private retailers are ripping us off thanks to Labor and the LNP’s privatisation of electricity retail in the early 2000s. Since then, the real price of electricity bills has more than doubled.
In the Queensland LNP government’s latest budget they were spruiking cheaper power bills due to a lower default market offer. The problem? If you’re in South East Queensland, you’ve been forced to use private retailers who have not passed on the lower prices, and instead hiked their fees. Only regional Queenslanders are guaranteed a price decrease, because they are serviced by government-owned Ergon Energy.
The Queensland government decided to send Origin, one of the retailers that has hiked their charges, a letter asking them to stop hiking their fees. But guess what?
They can only ask nicely - they have absolutely no power to force them.
Because we privatised electricity retail, remember?
In 2024 AGL made $755 in profit per customer, per year for household electricity. Origin made around $600 in profit per customer, per year. That’s you, not paying for the electricity you use, but instead paying the price of privatisation.
What an absurd system where we have these for-profit middle men between, often publicly owned electricity generation, and the customer who just wants cheaper bills.
Essential services like electricity should be in public hands.
You get high bills, poor service, outsourced call centres, outages.
The CEOs? They get enormous pay packages.
Optus CEO? He’s on over $3 million a year. Telstra CEO? She took home $6.8 million last year. An 11% pay rise despite scandals.
The privatisation of telecommunications has been a disaster for everyday Australians.
We have retailers using the exact same infrastructure, just with different branding.
Telstra and Optus both make billions each year in profit, but can’t provide basic services properly. Optus doesn’t even pay any tax!
Across both networks, coverage is poor even in areas of my electorate, less than 20km from the Brisbane CBD in suburbs like Kenmore and Moggill.
Telstra and Optus are among the least trusted companies in Australia, for good reason.
And then there’s the NBN. Same nonsense. NBN is publicly owned apparently, so why are there dozens of different internet providers who don’t do anything but rip you off with different fake deals?
The market means you have a choice! You get to choose between dozens of middle men offering the same thing and creaming huge profits off the top.
This might be starting to sound like an ‘old woman yells at cloud’ moment, but seriously, what kind of system is this?
Great for the CEOs, terrible for the rest of us.
Time for essential services to be returned to public hands.
Don’t let politicians sell you fake solutions. A little bit of regulation here, a little subsidy there, a little tweak. It’s all nonsense. Designed to distract and confuse, to make you feel like nothing can really be done, while companies keep making record profits.
But the solution is staring us in the face: We have to end 40 years of privatisation and corporate rule.
For decades now we’ve had two major parties giving corporations a free ride.
They sold off banking,
energy,
telecommunications,
air travel,
pharmaceuticals,
public housing,
employment services.
They set up schemes where private corporations get cushy government contracts and charge the taxpayer exorbitant sums for subsidies – rather than do the job themselves. Now we’re all paying.
This country has to get real about ending this scam.
We’ve got to get real about bringing essential services back into public hands, and putting everyday people back in control.