this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Australia is a live example of the fact that they're not. The state and federal governments have privatised a crap load of services and all they do is continue to hike our bills while providing less and less service. Electricity, water supply, employment services and more are now an absolute joke here.
Yep because what's more important than efficient, cost effective services? Spoiler, it's profit.
Profit for their mates and fellow shareholders, not profit for the country either.
And they don't update the infrastructure, UK is also an excellent example of this and they are getting to the point that the government will have to step in to help them sort things out. All this so that a bunch of rich people are richer.
Exactly what's about to happen to employment services in Australia too. They spend more money chasing a hand full of people who don't want to work than just continuing to pay them the pittance they exist on and have people apply to be the CEO of huge corporations who dropped out of high school in order to make their quotas. Government just announced an inquiry with the aim to reinstate control over it.
This reminds me of something I'd heard about public transport operated by local governments, not sure how true it is but the theory makes sense. But basically the local public transport company ran by the local government, spends more on the infrastructure and enforcement of people paying fares than they get back in the fares themselves and that operating the services free of charge would actually reduce the cost of running the service.
Which when you start to think about how you need officers to spot check people on public transport, roll out the machines for tickets/smart cards, server infrastructure to run the machines, technicians to service the machines, IT staff to run servers etc etc it does somewhat make sense
Yes, if not for when the Labor (sic) party got into power that one time, we'd all still be stuck on ADSL2 at best, and dialup at worst, depending on how close you live to a major-ish city. The NBN was a government infrastructure initiative. One which got gutted and watered down as soon as the Liberals got back in.
Oh, and I've heard industry insiders claim that the mixed technology stack employed in the "new NBN" -- FTTP for some places that already got it, FTTN for everywhere else in the city, fixed wireless or satellite for rural areas -- is more expensive on an ongoing basis due to complications than just rolling out more fibre would have been in the long run.
Not to mention the state of ISPs in Australia. I believe you pay more for less than almost every country. Two exceptions being the US and Canada.