PART OF THE ROLE OF AN MP – COMMITTEE WORK
Committee work, through NSW Parliament, is one of the real privileges and opportunities to learn and serve that is presented to MPs. It has been my experience over the past 14 years that Committee work forces you to deeply explore topics that you might otherwise have never had an interest or knowledge of.
While I am currently the Chairperson of 3 Committees and Deputy Chair of one other, most recently I was tasked with a fascinating Inquiry into power/electricity outage in the Far West of NSW during October 2024.
For those that have been lucky enough to travel in the western parts of NSW, you will appreciate that towns are often 100-200-400km away from each other. You will also appreciate that mobile phone reception is limited. And you will know that a trip to the supermarket, or Dr, or hardware store, might be an 8 hour drive, round trip.
With all of this in mind, it won’t take too much imagination to understand the size of the impact when the electricity supply fails. And when the electricity fails, so too does the telecommunication capacity provided by mobile towers fail.
The Committee Inquiry heard that in the middle of the night, power was shut down because electricity towers hundreds of kilometres away were blown down by a wind storm. And guess what; the back-up power solutions (generators) didn’t work the way they were supposed to.
What followed was a succession of failures between the privatised companies, that used to be Government owned businesses, and the community at large. And it seems that no responsibility was taken by anyone.
Meanwhile, despite the businesses that had failed to deliver electricity now being private companies, the community turned to Government, not the private companies, for solutions, support and interventions.
This is, yet again, a failure of privatisation of Government and community assets. In the end, it is always the taxpayer and the Government picking up the pieces while the private operators gobble up the profits, before and after the event.
As a challenge to my readers, I would love to hear a story of when/where privatisation led to a better outcome for customers. And if you can name 1, can you name 2, or possibly 3? Given that 100+ Government services have been privatised over the last 15 years, if you could actually name 3 good outcomes, we would still be batting 3% good and 97% bad. So please, let me know what worked well and why this approach to privatisation makes sense?
NEW AMBULANCE STATIONS AND A NEW ROLE FOR OUR PARAMEDICS
It is not new news that the NSW Government is looking to build new Ambulance Stations across the Cessnock Electorate, in Branxton/North Rothbury as well as Edgeworth. It is also not new news that the NSW Government will add 500 new regional paramedics to the roster.
The incredible skills of our paramedics cannot be overstated. They have been trained to be highly talented and capable providers of urgent health care.
It should be no surprise that the Government is now looking to these incredibly talented professional to use their skills a little bit more, across the health care of our society at large. In more remote communities, it is even being looked at to allow our ambulance officers to work alongside our Hospital’s Emergency Departments.