Grievance Debate

Public Transport Privatisation

Mr MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Leader of the Opposition) (15:13): I might start on a note of bipartisanship and second the Minister for Education's remarks in regard to Bluey. It is an outstanding show and, rest assured, it provides a rare moment of quiet and respite in the Mali household when the phone is ringing of a morning.

I rise to speak about an important matter of public policy that I think many more South Australians have growing grave concern about in regard to this state government's decision to privatise our train and tram network in South Australia but in this instance specifically their concerns around the process of the privatisation of the train network.

It is important to remember where this idea originates from. It originates, in fact, from a commitment made by this Premier before the last state election, where he said, without equivocation, that he did not have a privatisation agenda. Almost instantaneously upon being elected, it strikes us that the Premier absolutely had a privatisation agenda. In that first state budget handed down in 2018, we learned of the privatisation of prisons and hospital patient transfers. From there, we learned about the privatisation of our backup generators. We heard of privatisation of the tram network and now we have got the privatisation of the train network. Heaven forbid, SA Pathology would have been privatised if not for the fact that COVID demonstrated the public value of that key service.

It starts with a broken promise. From there, what we have seen is not just a lack of integrity around the maintenance of a commitment made but a lack of integrity around this process generally. Drip by drip, leak by leak, pieces of information come out that demonstrate that this whole contract stinks. The integrity in the lead-up to the signing of this contract is sorely lacking. First we had amendments to the process halfway through it, including the introduction of loser fees on the back of the fact that there were bidders who were seeking to withdraw from the process, we understand, not once but twice, and we understand that one of the people who tried to exit from the process was the eventual winner of that contract, the company Keolis Downer.

We know that loser fees have been an issue. We know that questions have been raised around probity in regard to the process, with the former Minister for Transport having meetings with some proponents and not others. That, amongst other revelations, led to one of the proponents writing to the probity adviser overseeing this privatisation, raising various serious questions about the legitimacy and the integrity of the process.

What this government now pretends to the people of South Australia that they were none the wiser, that they had nothing to do with it, to the extent that we have seen a performance today from none other than the current Minister for Transport, who has been overseeing the signing of this contract, saying that he knows nothing about emails that are in his possession and, indeed, making allegations against the opposition that somehow the member for West Torrens or others was fabricating such emails, emails that are in the minister's possession.

That, of course, is on the back of the fact that this government decided to spend $1.2 million, from memory, on a private consultant to oversee the privatisation—taxpayers' dollars, resulting in a privatisation they promised would never occur. What is worse is that we have already started to see the implications of this.

We said early on that privatisation of essential services of this nature always means three things: (1) people lose jobs, (2) a diminished service, and (3) a higher cost to the taxpayer in the end. It has already been realised. We understand that approximately 30 fewer train drivers will be in the system as a result of this privatisation. We know that the contract is worth $2.1 billion. That is right, $2.1 billion of South Australian taxpayers' hard-earned money is now going into the pockets of an overseas company to run their own train network. It is a disgrace. We know that a worse outcome in services is yet to come.

The gall of this minister to go down to the Flinders Link project and somehow try to disguise the fact that this project has something to do with privatisation is patently absurd. We are going to continue to scrutinise this process, we are going to continue to scrutinise this contract and, if this government had any backbone, any basic integrity, they would have taken this policy to the election. They did not, but we will and the choice will be South Australians'.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The leader's time has expired.