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More electric public transport is absolutely essential. Selling public electricity assets to achieve this seems counter intuitive to me. Perhaps I'm missing something. Could anyone explain the logic in this?
I think it's because essential services like public transport, water and electricity, they're a lose-only thing for a government. If they're working well everyone takes them for granted and no-one gets extra votes. If they're going badly everyone complains and votes are lost.
If they're in private hands, the government can say, "well, nothing to do with us..."
I don't understand the NSW Labor party at all, but one very optimistic interpretation is that:
(1) They do want the money to build more public (electric) transport
(2) They recognise that carbon trading and maybe carbon taxes are coming, and they are better off offloading their coal fired power generation capacity to the private sector and let them wear the resulting loss in value (lets face it, Victorian privatisation was a financial disaster for the buyers)