John Quiggin
about attitudes towards privatisation:
Most interesting to me was a study by Jonathan Kelly and Joanna Sikora showing that public opinion
against privatisation has hardened steadily over time. In 1986, views on the privatisation of Telstra
were about evenly divided. By 2002, 70 per cent were opposed and only 16 per cent in favour. Similar
views apply even to firms like the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas that have been privatised for years,
and opposition is even stronger in the case of Australia Post, the only business in the study still
in full public ownership.It’s difficult to attribute this to emotional attachments to Aussie icons, in view of the fact that
people were quite willing to contemplate privatisation in the 1980s. Advocates of privatisation hoped
that experience would lead people to accept it. In fact, the reverse has been the case, here as in
Britain and New Zealand. People have experienced privatisation and they don’t like it.