Among many other challenges in dealing with the failure of urban policy in Australia, the Minns government is faced with the task of renegotiating, or repudiating, the disastrous set of contracts for toll roads in New South Wales made by its predecessors (Labor and Liberal) with the Transurban group. As a review by Allan Fels and David Cousins has found, the government is at risk of being held hostage by toll operators. According to Fels and Cousins, immediate legislation is needed “as a backup to negotiations and to give the government power if necessary to determine final outcomes”.
This is by no means an isolated case. The failure of the National Electricity Market, premised on the idea of competition between private companies, has led state and federal governments to re-enter the business of electricity generation, storage and transmission. The disastrous experiment with private prisons in NSW is being unwound. Plans for the eventual privatisation of the NBN, established in response to the failure of the privatised Telstra to deliver national broadband, have been abandoned.
