Sold Off: NSW's Long History of Privatising What Belongs to You

The Pattern Nobody Voted For

Imagine you own a house. One day, a family member sells the furniture, the car, and eventually the deed to the house itself - pocketing the cash, spending it quickly, and leaving you paying rent on what used to be yours. That is not a perfect metaphor for what has happened in New South Wales over the past three decades, but it is closer than most politicians would like to admit.

Since the 1990s, successive NSW governments - Labor and Coalition alike - have privatised public assets on a scale that is genuinely staggering. Electricity networks, poles and wires, generators, ports, the Land Registry Services, motorways, and more have been sold or leased to private operators. The dollar figures are enormous. The democratic mandate? Often non-existent.

What Has Actually Been Sold

Here is a straightforward account of some of the largest transactions:

The electricity network privatisations alone - bundled under the "electricity poles and wires" deals - transferred control of infrastructure that had been publicly owned for generations to private consortiums, many with significant foreign ownership. Ausgrid, which supplies power to around 1.7 million homes and businesses across Sydney, the Hunter and the Central Coast, is now majority-owned by IFM Investors and other institutional funds.

But the one that genuinely shocked many people was Land Registry Services.

The Land Titles Scandal

In 2017, the Berejiklian government leased NSW Land Registry Services - the office responsible for maintaining the official register of who owns every property in the state - to a private consortium called Australian Registry Investments for $2.6 billion over 35 years.

Think about what this means. The legal record of your home's ownership is now managed by a private company motivated by profit. The consortium includes First State Super and Hastings Funds Management. Should any data breach, corporate failure, or dispute arise, the implications for property owners are profound.

The NSW Auditor-General raised concerns at the time. Legal academics questioned the constitutional and public interest implications. Community groups protested. It went ahead anyway.

Fees for property transactions have since increased. In 2023, a standard property title search that once cost a modest administrative fee had risen significantly under the private operator. For a state experiencing one of the worst housing affordability crises in its history, adding private profit-taking to every property transaction is a peculiar policy choice.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

Politicians from both major parties offer a consistent justification: "recycling capital." Sell an asset, take the cash, use it to build new infrastructure like hospitals and roads. On paper, this sounds reasonable. In practice, there are serious problems with the argument.

• You sell once, you pay forever. A 99-year lease on Ausgrid means NSW residents pay private returns on that infrastructure for nearly a century. The long-term cost almost certainly exceeds the upfront gain.
• Regulated monopolies don't behave like competitive markets. Electricity networks, land registries, and ports are natural monopolies. There is no competition. Privatising them does not create efficiency through market pressure - it creates a private toll collector on essential infrastructure.
• The evidence on electricity prices is damning. Australia's electricity prices increased significantly in the years following privatisation. The Australian Energy Market Commission and multiple independent reviews have linked privatisation - and the profit extraction it enables - to higher consumer bills.
• The money gets spent. NSW's "Restart NSW" fund, fed by asset sale proceeds, was used to fund infrastructure. But when the money is gone, the income stream from those assets is gone permanently.

Who Benefits - And Why It Persists

The beneficiaries of privatisation are identifiable: investment funds, institutional investors, foreign capital, and the financial advisers who structure these multi-billion-dollar transactions and collect substantial fees. These entities are well-organised, well-resourced, and maintain close relationships with the political class through lobbying, donations, and the revolving door between government and the private sector.

Labor is not innocent here. The Carr and Iemma Labor governments attempted to privatise electricity assets in the 2000s, only to be blocked - including by their own caucus and unions. When the Coalition eventually succeeded, they used a model (long-term leases rather than outright sales) partly designed to make the deals more politically palatable. The Minns Labor government, elected in 2023, inherited these arrangements and has shown little appetite to revisit them.

Ordinary voters, meanwhile, consistently tell pollsters they oppose privatisation of essential services. A 2015 survey by the Australia Institute found over 70% of NSW voters opposed the electricity network privatisations - including a majority of Coalition voters. It happened anyway.

This Is Exactly Why Direct Democracy Matters

If NSW residents had been given a direct vote on whether to lease Ausgrid, TransGrid, or the Land Registry to private investors, the evidence strongly suggests they would have voted no. The same is true for the port privatisations, and likely the electricity generators before them.

But they were never asked. Major party governments - on both sides - pursued these policies because their financial backers wanted them, because Treasury advisers recommended them, and because the political system rewards short-term budget optics over long-term public interest. Voters got a say every four years on a bundle of hundreds of policies, which means no single policy ever truly faces democratic accountability.

Direct Democracy changes this. When members vote on specific policies, the voice of ordinary people - not donors, not lobbyists, not investment banks - shapes the outcome. Privatisation of essential public infrastructure is precisely the kind of decision that should require explicit public consent, not a quiet Cabinet sign-off followed by a press release.

The assets belong to the people of NSW. The decisions about those assets should belong to them too.

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