they did in all states and in the few that did sell off their assets the price sky rocketed(SA VIC) . The government controlled power assets clearly has kept the price down. That is one of the reason there is huge opposition to the current scum of the earth liberals plans in QLD and NSW to sell these assets off. Currently all drinking water assets are government owned as far as I ma aware.
food is not as critical. you can survive weeks without anything to eat, approx 4 days without water. and again as far as I know all drinking water assets in this country are government owned as far as I am aware so that is allready the case water will not be a battle ground in the future the technology is already here to see that not be an issue.
nuclear is one of the cheapest sources or electricity considering the CT that we now have in place. I was not talking about renewables when talking about cheap but if the CT ( and Phoney Tony prob wont be removing ti any time soon as promised ) stays they are looking more attractive.
We've had this conversation in the past and most of the propaganda surrounding the privatisations simply isn't true.
Well you shouldn't have said powered by renewables then. W.r.t. nuclear I think it is still highly debatable about whether it would have actually been cheaper in the past and whether it is even an economic option at the moment.
Surprisingly, on Tuesday I shared a flight with several high level executives from one of the big electricity suppliers. I won't go into detail, but I would not be surprised if the cost of electricity goes up.
That graph is not how much we pay and is not relevant to this discussion. in QLD we pay less per day connection fee and less per kw/h than consumers in Victoria r SA or NSW Even if their costs bases are higher,( QLD is a much bigger state with a far less de-centralized population -- the network bases costs are higher here than VIC) it means they are happy to make less profit, unlike the private companies runnin the show in SA and VIC.
The Nestle CEO made a video. Paraphrasing his statements: Water should be considered a foodstuff with a market value. Privatisation of water supply is good. Water should have a price. Access to water as a fundamental right is a disagreeable extremist position of NGOs. "Specific measures" should be taken for the part of the population that then has no access to privatised water. Statements made just after the 2min mark in this video. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C29_U0Ksao[/youtube]
Water does have a price anyway. Someone has to provide it and they have to be paid one way or another. The fact remains that the best way for a product to achieve the widest possible distribution is if there is a profit to be made on it. If you have a competitive market so that profit margins are low, the only way that companies can make decent amounts of money is through lots of volume which means lots of sales to as many people as possible. What he's saying is that those who for whatever reason can't get it, then they should be helped out so they can get access. Why is that a douche thing to say?
People don't like the idea of water (or other things) being monetised, I think, because the money and financial system that we currently have is f**ked up to say the least. It creates massive imbalances everywhere from the global scale of country finances right down to people's personal finances. I don't think this would be an issue if money was the unbiased measuring tool that it should be. But at the moment it's like a ruler where the unit lengths are constantly changing (and not even in a predictable way) and so people have learnt to distrust it. The ironic thing is that they usually go running to the institution that wrecked money.
I just thought that it was an obvious and statement that has been widely discussed in mainstream media to prepare the masses. Don't really need details as it has been flagged before.
^ Blaming the regulator for the price of electricity and then calling on the regulator to solve the problem?
