Mike and the Mechanics

GH wants to hear the case against

“Ever thought about an IPO of the Royal Family, Harry?”

When contemplating a sale, it is generally advisable to check out the salesman’s track record. Ten years ago, when he was premier of New South Wales, Mike Baird oversaw the partial privatisation of the state’s ‘poles and wires’ over and above the objections of many well-informed observers, not to mention the Labor opposition and trade unions. It has been a costly and problematic exercise, which the Minns government is currently reviewing in order to restore public interest in transmission planning. The Australian Energy Regulator and peer-reviewed literature have explicitly fingered the privatisation for steepling network costs and retail power prices. But Baird, in the way of these things, has moved on: now he is selling Australian cricket.

The scenarios are different, of course. Not even the most ardent cricket lover would consider the Big Bash League to be ‘critical infrastructure’, even if it is of public character. But it is a form of asset recycling, involving an irreversible release of capital allegedly better used elsewhere - even if nobody will tell us where and how. Similarities extend even to personnel. Cricket Australia’s advisers in the mooted sale are Barrenjoey Partners, whose founder Matthew Grounds, then at UBS Australia, advised the government on those controversial ninety-nine-year leases of TransGrid, Ausgrid, and Endeavour Energy. It was Grounds whom Baird’s office rang to complain when UBS’s bank analysts, independent of the process, published a critical analysis, which was then watered down.

Et Al may get a phone call after this, but the hell with it. On Monday, I noted that Cricket Australia had signally failed to make the case for privatisation of the Big Bash League; what they have also failed to do is even acknowledge the case against. And the case against, that ultimately private capital obeys its own commercial logic and knows loyalty only to itself, is cautionary, as the costs are real, recurrent and inescapable.