An un-holy alliance
By Christopher Sheil
"There is no clear evidence from experience that the investment which is socially advantageous coincides with that which is the most profitable."
- John Maynard Keynes
The first thing anyone can notice about so-called 'public-private partnerships' - or 'PPPs' - is that the subject presents itself as both complicated and boring; so complicated and boring that even editors of the Australian Financial Review have complained to me about being 'PPPed out'.2 Indeed, the topic can be so complicated and boring that one suspects this is a deliberate part of the political marketing strategy. If the editors of the Fin find the topic tedious, what hope can critics have of raising public awareness and debate?
Let me try to cut through some of the complexity, even if I cannot promise to be entertaining. Actually, when preparing this paper I spent some time searching cyberspace for jokes about PPPs, without luck. I naturally thought this was because the topic is so dry and complex. But, on second thought, it occurred that the reason no one bothers to think up jokes about PPPs is that the policy-makers have already done the job for us.
Privatisation The first joke in all the policy papers that have been released by our State Labor governments is an insistence that PPPs are not privatisation. The Western Australian PPP paper, for example, states in the opening paragraph of its introduction that the government 'has a clear policy position that it does not support privatisation'. Likewise, the NSW document says that the policy 'does not mean privatisation of public services'. These statements must be a joke, since all the papers are all about, and all of them are only about, privatisation. No, this doesn't mean that the policies are about 'privatisation by stealth' - the promoters don't really mind the policies being described as 'privatisation by stealth', for this helps them to keep up the joke, which is that these policies are not about privatisation, pure and simple.
Let me insist, and we all should insist, that they are about privatisation, no more no less. The point must be hammered. A close reading of the PPP policy documents reveals that the only public activities that they all exclude from privatisation are school teaching and clinical services within hospitals. The schools and hospitals can be privatised, but the governments have generally promised that they will still continue to employ the teachers, doctors and nurses who work in them. Some governments have gone a little further. The Victorian government has also ruled out privatising the judges within the court system, as has the Western Australian government, which has also ruled out privatising the police and 'offender management'.
This then is the first point to be made. Read at their widest, the policies that have been represented as PPPs amount to a New Right Utopia. There is no barrier within these policy papers that can prevent state governments being reduced to the point where they own nothing, and their sole direct tasks will be teaching school children and tending the sick. In Victoria and Western Australia, they'll also continue to employ judges, and Western Australia also promises to continue to employ police and manage 'offenders'. So let's be clear: these policy papers supply no other limits. Beyond these slender commitments, PPPs amount to open slather for privatisation.
I lie. The truth is that the policies don't even supply these limits. A close reading of the Victorian policy, for example, reveals that the government has only promised to remain directly responsible for 'core' services. The problem is that, when we go to the definition of 'core', we find that this does not necessarily even include education and hospital services. The policy doesn't make a clear statement that these are core services and are therefore not subject to the PPP policy. Rather, what the policy says is that these tasks 'are widely regarded as core services'. Note, the policy does not say that the Victorian government regards these services as 'core', only that others do. Given that the paper also explicitly states that the definition of core services will be decided on a 'case by case' basis, strictly, the policy remains utterly open-ended.
This is, perhaps, a form of stealth. Yet it's not 'privatisation by stealth'; rather, it is pure and simple, in your face privatisation, plus a good deal of 'stealth' in defining the real limits of the policies.3 This is true of all the states. Despite their qualified allusions to protecting so-called 'core' services, all the policies emphasise their open-ended scope. The Western Australian government's policy is perhaps the most explicitly open-ended. In contrast to the vagaries employed to describe the few functions that the government intends to keep, the policy paper presents an explicit list of areas that WA is actively seeking to privatise. These are: transport and port facilities, health facilities, education facilities, water supply and waste water treatment, electricity generation, transmission and distribution, gas supply and distribution, housing development and new housing estates, land development, and major construction processes. This list, the paper emphasises, is 'non-exclusive'.
So this is the first Orwellian-style joke that the State Labor governments are enjoying at the expense of their citizens. In the tradition of 1984's Big Brother, who insisted that war is peace, that freedom is slavery and that ignorance is strength, the governments have all released policy papers that set out privatisation policies, which they insist are not privatisation policies. Again, let's be clear. Private isn't public. Privatising water, electricity and transport can only mean privatising water, electricity and transport, regardless of whether the government does or does not continue to directly employ judges and police. Likewise, privatising school and hospital facilities, which presently appear to be at the front-line of the PPP policies, can only mean privatising school and hospital facilities, regardless of whether the government does or does not continue to employ school teachers and nurses.
The reasons why the governments are refusing to say that their privatisation policies are privatisation policies are plain enough. Despite 20 years of bi-partisan pro-privatisation rhetoric accompanied by a privatisation program valued at around $150 billion - a program that has placed Australia at the top of the world privatisation rankings - the public has remained implacably opposed to the policy.4 Opinion surveys always show - always show - that between 60 and 70 per cent of Australians are opposed to privatisation; an opposition that stretches across all demographics and voting intentions. So entrenched is the opposition that even the majority of Telstra shareholders are opposed to the further privatisation of Telstra.5
Given the unpopularity, politicians have simply removed the word; they have scrubbed out 'privatisation' and replaced it with a new descriptor called 'partnership' and continued to advance privatisation under this banner. We will come to the banner, and then to some of the issues that arise under the new policies. But first, let me quote from a speech made by the Australian Auditor-General in April, which goes to the most general concern about the cheap assurances the governments are issuing about so-called 'core' services and the continuing privatisation of the nation's public sector: Outsourcing and privatising areas traditionally considered public sector activities indicates that the size of the core is shrinking. A broader issue is whether, over the longer term, the public sector might diminish to a point at which it no longer constitutes a credible, effective or viable arm of sound governance.6
Partnerships
This brings us to the second running joke, which is the insistence that the policies are not promoting privatisation, but 'partnerships'. Now we all know what partnerships are. We have tennis partners, marriage partners, bridge partners, business partners and so on, and in every case - in all conventional contexts - if the term is to have a distinct meaning, 'partnership' must carry connotations of equality, with the partners working toward a joint goal.
Almost nothing in these latest privatisation policies can be fairly described as providing for the formation of partnerships, apart from the frequent rhetorical assertions that the policies do have this aim. On the contrary, almost all the detail testifies to the primary aim of establishing long-term commercial contracts, provided these represent so-called 'value for money'. This is made unequivocal by the universal stipulation that private firms will only be contracted to supply specified 'outputs'. This automatically necessarily means that the governments will remain solely responsible for the outcomes from the deals.7 The inescapable conclusion is that the policies thus provide for the establishment of asymmetric business relationships; relationships so starkly asymmetric that they cannot be defined as 'partnerships'. The policies amount to no more than conventional principal-agent contract relations, and principal-agent contract relationships are not, and cannot in any reasonable sense, be described as 'partnerships'.
The role of the 'partnership' rhetoric is simply to hide the unpopularity of privatisation behind a term that implies equality, and thereby evoke a friendly glow. There are dangers in this marketing rhetoric that go beyond just fooling Joe Public. The danger is that the terminology will also fool the governments themselves. The risk is that the positive connotations of equality and joint goals that are associated with the rhetoric of partnership will confuse and tend to disarm the governments and their officials. There are places for genuine partnerships with government. But falsely characterising garden variety principal-agent contracts as partnerships only encourages institutional capture, allowing select private firms privileged access to market and political intelligence and generally interfering with the necessarily hard-headed and unprejudiced evaluation of whether or not the proposed privatisations are socially beneficial.8
Costs and benefits Given that we are talking about various forms of privatisation, what can we say about the costs and benefits? Let's leave aside the open-ended character of the polices, and assume for the moment that we are just talking about the present agenda to privatise schools and hospitals. The first thing to say is that it is mistaken to think that private provision will bring additional funding for these facilities. On the contrary, privatisation is merely a more expensive alternative to funding the infrastructure through public borrowing in the traditional way.
There is some inescapable arithmetic here. Irrespective of whether the infrastructure continues to be funded through the public sector or by private firms, there is no doubt about where most of the money will come from: it will be borrowed from the managers of the nation's swelling superannuation funds. The inescapable arithmetic is that the funds will lend money to the government by purchasing bonds for a return of less than 4 per cent, whereas they demand an additional risk premium of 6-8 per cent from consortia that offer private infrastructure bonds.9
Moreover, with private firms, someone must also fund the cost of raising the capital, involving the structuring of the projects, undertaking risk evaluation, carrying out debt and equity placement, and so on, which is usually 3 to 4 per cent of the total cost.10 Further, although this is rarely mentioned, additional costs also arise because, unlike state governments, private firms must pay tax. While quasi-taxes or tax equivalents may theoretically be applied to the 'public sector comparator' (in the name of 'competitive neutrality' - yes, the national competition policy lurks behind PPPs), this doesn't remove the private tax disadvantage; it merely transfers its manifestation from the comparator to the Treasuries.
The arithmetic therefore says that the cost to the public of capital under privatisation is at least double the cost of raising the funds directly through the public sector in the traditional way: instead of the government rate of less than 4 per cent interest; private consortia must receive between 9 and 16 per cent.11 In turn, this means that the only way that PPPs can be profitable to private firms is if the service quality is reduced, the taxpayer is gouged, or large-scale efficiency gains are found.
It beggars belief to imagine that large-scale efficiencies can be found by privatising social infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. The most likely prospect is that the services will decline. In the UK, where private financing has been operating for some years now, the diversion of funds to cover the additional costs for private hospital development has led to a 30 per cent reduction in bed capacity and a 20 per cent reduction in hospital staff.12 An extensive study of the record was also undertaken last year by Tony Blair's favourite think-tank, the Institute of Public Policy Research. Although heavily criticised for being a deeply interested attempt to 'talk out' the policy's opponents, the report found no significant efficiency gains in hospitals and schools.13
This stands to reason, for it has long been recognised that the major opportunity for capturing efficiencies in this area is in the construction phase, which is already conventionally put out to private tender. Conceivably, there may also be some gains to be made by tendering for maintenance, or bundling the maintenance task with the construction tender, although these gains are only likely to be small and are, in any event, hotly contested in the literature.14 Regardless, there is no need to flog private ownership rights or long-term private franchises for schools and hospitals in order to capture these gains.
Risk allocation So how do the policies justify the additional costs? The magic pudding that fills the cost gap is known as 'risk allocation'. We don't really have the space to delve into the complexities here, but let me make some quick points.
First, the idea that substantive risk transfer occurs in these deals is another PPP joke. As mentioned, construction risks, the obvious risks in social infrastructure, have already been privatised. And, as also mentioned, the policies explicitly stipulate that the governments will remain fully and solely responsible for the outcomes, with the private firms only being responsible for so-called 'outputs'. This means that, if the privatisation of schools and hospitals has adverse impacts on education and health, the governments will continue to carry the can for every residual thing - beyond the specified outputs, and including whether or not the outputs are philosophically, legally, economically, politically and technically adequately specified.15
This leaves the major risk that all normal private firms face; the risk that gives some authentic meaning to the notion of private enterprise, but which is non-existent in these cases. This is the risk that there will not be sufficient demand for a firm's product, or that it will be undercut by competition. In the case of PPPs, this risk is borne by the governments, since they have all undertaken to guarantee demand for 25-30 years. This remarkable government guarantee underwrites all PPP policies. It's the river of gold for which the private consortia are bidding. Note the contrast between the extraordinary 25-30 year public income security to be granted to the new owners under the privatisations courtesy of the nation's taxpayers, and the receding security it entails for Australian workers.16 From this perspective, we can say not only that PPP policies are about privatisation; we can also say that, in the most vital sense, they're not about private enterprise.
If none of the major risks are transferred under the policy, how can risk be used to justify the policy? The answer is that the governments have adopted an idiosyncratic definition of risk. Ever since Frank Knight (1921), conventional economics literature has defined risk as an actuarial concept, applying to randomness that may affect returns that can be specified in terms of insurable numerical possibilities (as with the likelihood of rain or lottery tickets). Beyond this strict definition, the probability of random occurrences affecting returns is a matter of subjective belief, or the concept shades into the broader concept of 'uncertainty'.17
The widespread use of subjective risk assessment, defined in a way that can include any and all imaginable uncertainties is cause for suspicion. A major study of risk allocation in the UK, for example, found that risk transfer was the critical element in proving the 'value for money' case for privatising public hospitals. For six hospitals, the value of the allocated risk varied by between an extraordinary 17.4 and 50.4 per cent of total capital costs. As it happened, in each case this just amounted to a cost that was sufficient to close the gap between the private and public options, often favouring the private proposal by less than only 0.1 per cent. Since there is no standard method of measuring the value of non-calculable risk, and since the UK government has not published the method it uses to arrive at its figures, the study concluded that the 'value for money analysis seems to be no more than a mechanism that has been created to make the case for using private finance'.18
The final point on the costs and benefits is that PPPs also create new and potentially costly political and technical risks. Given that the policies cannot, and explicitly do not, transfer the residual risks to the private firms, this means that the governments are automatically exposed to moral hazard - or the practice of regulatory gaming in order to shift any unspecified or unanticipated costs back onto the public.
Opportunities to exploit moral hazard are encouraged by the unavoidable reduction in public accountability that comes with the attribution of private rights in public infrastructure. This follows by definition, since the public monitoring of private performance, including 'step in rights', can only ever amount to partial supervision; that is, if monitoring is not less than partial, than the government would effectively still remain the manager or shadow manager of the infrastructure - a costly duplication that would destroy any possibility of efficiency gains. The incentives thus encourage partial monitoring. And to the extent that monitoring is partial, private firms capture opportunities to exploit the government's continuing responsibility for the policy outcomes.19
Aside from the risks in moral hazard, the arrangements also create new technical risks. Anyone who has read my book on the failures in the Sydney and Adelaide water infrastructure, or who has been following the corporate crisis in the US, will know that there are many ways in which firms can increase their earnings without enhancing productivity by exposing the public to additional risks.20 Many of the technical and accounting risks that comprise the actors in Water's Fall are applicable within privatised schools and hospitals, where we can also find other specific risks.
In hospitals, for example, the current proposals will divide the ownership and control of the buildings from the clinical services, yet there is an obvious relationship between the two, since the level of building hygiene is a direct cause of hospital-acquired infections. This will introduce a direct conflict. It will be in the new operators' interest to minimise expenditures in all areas, but in the public interest for investment levels to be technically optimised. Assuming the private operators are risk-neutral rational-maximisers, as PPP policies themselves generally do, this ensures that, at the least, there will be service losses at the margin. In the UK, technical risks have also emerged. At the privately financed Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford and Gravesham, nurses have complained that the design was not conducive to effective care, and equipment was not working properly when the hospital opened. At the new Princess Margaret Hospital in Swindon, the recovery room is located 80 metres from the operating theatre.21 Other hospitals have faced leaking sewage, unusable rooms, and no air conditioning. Cumberland Infirmary has become infamous for its glass atrium that was too hot in the summer, while in other privately financed hospitals there have been complaints of corridors that are too narrow to turn a trolley and of nurses' stations being placed where some patients cannot be seen. 22
Similar risks will be opened up in schools. In the UK, where the Blair government is openly subsidising school privatisation, last month one school discovered that, at the urging of the UK Treasury and education department, its new 25-year contract didn't include the cost of 'furniture and equipment', 'access for wheelchair users', or 'cabling and IT provision'. Nor was provision made for the costs of emptying the classrooms, storing equipment, or replacing it after refurbishment. Other hidden additional costs have also been discovered in the UK's schools. For example, the classroom size set out in the contracts is now too small for the curriculum needs in at least three schools.23
The necessary variations that must be made to the original UK contracts will now add substantial new costs on to the schools, which reminds us that perhaps the most important if inherently undefinable risks created by the polices are those which are presently unforeseeable, since they relate to the continuing development of educational and health standards. Remembering that the policies involve 25 to 30 year contracts, we must also remember that, as standards change which require changing building space or servicing requirements, governments will have to deal with today's competitive private provider, who by virtue of the contract will have automatically become tomorrow's private monopoly abuser.24
Why have governments gone this way?
If all this is true, if the policy is nothing but virtually open slather for privatisation, which is deeply unpopular, more costly, leaves the substantial and residual risks with the governments and creates new risks, we are left with one question, which is why on earth have the State Labor governments gone this way?
There appear to be two interlocking reasons. The first is simply the opportunity PPPs present to exploit an accounting quirk, whereby the liabilities incurred are entered into the public accounts as expenses rather than debt. Here it is important to appreciate that all the fiscal characteristics of the PPPs are exactly the same as public debt, except these funds are more expensive and less flexible. While strictly this means that they will increase the exposure of the governments to financial risk compared with debt, they are not accounted for in the same way and therefore do not incur the same scrutiny or criticism. It is this practice of shifting debt off the balance sheet through a giant web of complex contractual arrangements that has led critics to label the Blair government as 'Enron-on-Thames'. Enron also called its deals 'partnerships'.
The contemporary refusal of the States to maintain, let alone increase, traditional public borrowing has thus opened up the way for PPPs. Let me stress that the present zero public debt policies are driven by nothing but pure populism, or economic irrationalism. There is no reputable rationale in any economic theory for our State governments not to borrow. Australia's public debt to GDP ratio is ridiculously low, at 6 per cent compared to an OECD average of 40 per cent. There is no microeconomic or macroeconomic justification for eliminating this remaining skerrick of debt. Leaving aside empty populist blather about mortgages, bankcards and baby boomers, the common justification that gets trotted out by grown-ups in this area is that public borrowing 'crowds out' more valuable private borrowing by raising interest rates. This is an entirely irrelevant consideration in this case, and it is theoretically wrong in any event.
As John Quiggin has pointed out, the macroeconomic effects of infrastructure investment will be exactly the same whether the investment is made collectively through the public sector or by select private firms.25 This is to say, whoever does the borrowing, the effects on firms outside the infrastructure sector will be identical. And as Kenneth Davidson has recently reminded us, in any event public borrowing levels do not determine Australia's interest rates. Rather, in globalised financial markets, interest is determined in relation to the world rate, with adjustments for inflation and currency risks. This is an easy point to demonstrate. While Australia has one of the world's lowest levels of public debt, our interest rates are among the world's highest. By contrast, Japan has the world's lowest interest rate, yet at 135 per cent of GDP has one of largest public debts. Likewise, the US has lower interest rates, but carries three times the level of public debt.26 Plainly, there is no straightforward relationship between public debt and interest rates.
Thus, the only available conclusion is that, effectively, our States have become imprisoned within their own populist anti-public debt rhetoric. Under the present circumstances, where pressure for public infrastructure investment is intense, PPPs are attractive because they offer the governments a way to take on debt-equivalent obligations, while avoiding the appearance of having done so.
This motivation dovetails with second reason why the States have gone this way, which is that the policies are simply a consequence of the direct political pressure from vested financial interests on the current Labor premiers. PPPs are attractive to the politicians as a way of pacifying or buying off the local lobbies, which, of course, are simply seeking secure public rents. Labor premiers always seem to be vulnerable to these kinds of pressures from the so-called 'big end of town'. This stems from the somewhat absurd but nevertheless lingering idea that Labor is somehow anti-business, or a poorer economic manager than the conservative parties. Labor governments always dread local business charges that lead to headlines like 'the go-slow state', the 'shut-down state', and so on, and hence they are always keen to prove their business credentials.27
Which is to say that, as far as can be divined, the policies have not been driven by the State Treasuries. This follows because PPPs deeply offend one of the most basic of Treasury operating principles: the law against hypothecation. All Treasuries hate hypothecation, or the ring-fencing of parts of the annual budget to particular areas. There are two levels of objection. The first and milder objection is to using hypothecation to raise additional money. This is bad, but not so very bad as the second objection, which is to hypothecating existing moneys.
It is not difficult to understand the Treasury objections. The more of a budget that gets immunised from annual management, the less room they have to move and the harder their annual budget task becomes. The more that certain areas are walled off from discretion, the less room they have to adjust for annual variations, and - by definition - the more that the pressure will fall on the remaining parts of the budget. This is an important point to appreciate, and is not well understood in the general community. To restate, the more public money that is hypothecated (tied) to the operation of physical infrastructure, the more that the pressure will automatically increase on the funds allocated for the remaining services.
And when we come to PPPs, we are talking hypothecation big time, since we are talking about hog-tying tax streams to private rents for up to 30 years. The value of the fixed-capital stock in NSW schools alone is some $17 billion. By definition, the process of continuously hypothecating budget funds to pay expensive rents for this infrastructure must continuously mount the pressure on the remaining service areas. In this sense, PPPs are analogous to those smart bombs that preserve buildings, but kill people.
Since we may assume that self-respecting, professional Treasury officials will be opposed to the policy, or at least policy neutral, we must therefore look to the political pressure that has been placed on the premiers by the business lobbies for the second of the interlocking explanations for the policy direction.
Conclusion: an un-holy alliance
In conclusion, the PPP policies effectively spring from an un-holy alliance between the irrational economics that underpin the zero public debt policy and the special pleading of vested financial interests. Of course, there are no mysteries about why the lobbyists are pushing so hard for the policies. Private consortia will always seek to purchase the benefit of a very secure income stream, with risk characteristics similar to a government security, but higher returns. Who can blame business for chasing the security of government contracts, as they always have? For business, self-interest is the name of the game and PPPs amount to a recession-proof form of corporate welfare. For business, the nanny-state is a very bad thing, unless of course it is business that is being nannied.
This brings us to my final point, which is to recall, as a colleague recently reminded me, that the ideology of private enterprise originated in opposition to governments allocating private monopolies. This point lends historical perspective to the objections to PPPs that have been raised in this paper, which are scarcely radical. To insist that private firms should stick to private enterprise is to insist on nothing more than a policy that has historically been most strongly advocated by Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith explains why governments, as masters, cannot give exclusive responsibilities to private commercial servants: The real interests of their masters ... is the same as the country ... But the real interests of the servants is by no means the same with that of the country, and the most perfect information would not necessarily put an end to their oppressions ... Such exclusive companies, therefore, are nuisances in every respect ...28
Christopher Sheil is a Visiting Fellow in the School of History at the University of New South Wales and the author of Water's Fall: Running the Risks with Economic Rationalism (Pluto Press, 2000). This paper was presented at the Evatt Foundation's Breakfast Seminar on PPPs at the Southern Cross Hotel, Sydney, on 16 August 2002.
Notes 1. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Macmillan, Cambridge 1973 [1936], p. 157. 2. This paper draws on research undertaken on behalf of the Evatt Foundation for the State Public Sector Federation (publication forthcoming). Note that the precise terms used to describe the policies that are the subject of this paper varies between jurisdictions. While public-private partnership (PPP) is commonly employed by the Australian media to describe the policies in all jurisdictions, NSW uses the term private finance project (PFP), and in the UK, where the policy originated, it is known as the public finance initiative (PFI). Nonetheless, both NSW and the UK also locate their polices within a wider (neo-corporatist?) framework of public-private partnerships. 3. See also Christopher Sheil, 'Muddy waters as tail tries to wag dog', Australian Financial Review, 7 December 2001. 4. For a recent survey, that only managed to find one poll in favour (in the case of privatisisng ports in 1994, and even then only by a 3 per cent margin), see David Hayward, 'The public good and the public services: what role for the private sector?' Dissent, Autumn-Winter 2002, pp. 8-12. 5. Ibid. 6. P. J. Barrett (Auditor-General for Australia), 'Implementing adequate supervision - What kind and how much?', Address to a laboratory for politicians and top managers from different public institutions in Europe, Regione Lombaredia, Italy, 6 April 2002. 7. This is an advance on past policies, since it makes explicit what has always been the case in the context of privatised essential services (see Christopher Sheil, Water's Fall, Running the Risks with Economic Rationalism, Pluto Press, 2000, p. 75). Regardless, the point being made here is that the explicit acknowledgement that this is the case makes nonsense of the idea of 'partnership'. 8. See also Christopher Sheil, 'Let's drop the PPP: it's simply a deal', Australian Financial Review, 15 February 2002. On the other hand, to the very slight extent that the policies do occasionally refer to conditions that really do suggest characteristics associated with genuine partnerships - such as the suggestion that is generally made that the governments should share in any 'windfall profits' that the private firms may gain - the policies tend toward government-business relations that have been heavily criticised in the past under the popular rubric of 'WA Inc'. Once governments have a financial stake in the earnings of the private firms, a whole range of important, difficult and unresolved horizontal accountability issues arise (see Barrett, op. cit.). 9. For the figures, see: John Quiggin, 'Sums starting to sink in', Australian Financial Review, 1 August 2002; Kenneth Davidson, 'What's left?' Dissent, Autumn-Winter 2002, pp. 2-4; Nixon Apple, 'Welcome to the 5% Club', Dissent, Spring 2002, pp. 8-10. 10. For the estimate, see Apple, op. cit., p. 8. 11. The reasons for the lower premium demanded of government has been long debated in the economics profession, and it is generally agreed that the difference is largely due to inefficiencies and transaction costs associated with private financing, on the one hand, and the high degree of security and liquidity associated with public borrowing, on the other. Yet, whatever the reason, the fact remains that it is cheaper for governments to borrow than it is for private consortia. On the equity premium puzzle, see John Quiggin, Great Expectations: Microeconomic Reform and Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp. 147-53. 12. Allyson Pollock, Jean Shoal & Neal Vickers, 'Private finance and "value for money" in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?' BMJ (British Medical Journal), 18 May 2002; 324 (7347): 1205-9. 13. Commission on Public Private Partnerships, Building Better Partnerships: the final Report of the Commission on Public Private Partnerships, Institute for Public Policy Research, London, 2001. 14. For a good discussion of the issues, including the story of the infamous 'Domberger 20 per cent', see Bob Walker & Betty Con Walker, Privatisation: Sell Off or Sell Out? ABC Books, Sydney, 2000, Ch 6. 15. Again, it is important to emphasise that the explicit recognition that this is the case by the State governments is a policy advance, but, again, the point being made here is that it makes nonsense of risk transfer (see also note 7 above). 16. See also Sheil (2000), op. cit., p. 76. 17. For a recent discussion, see Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001, esp. pp. 151-2, 211-12. 18. Pollock et. al., op. cit., Transparency is also a major concern in the Australian policies, as the final contracts will not even be available for scrutiny by the parliaments or Auditors-General, let alone citizens generally. Rather, the policies only commit to making contract summary statements available. The lack of transparency has been a constant source of outrage in the UK. See, for example, George Monbiot, 'Public fraud initiative', Guardian, 18 June 2002, and 'Public disgrace', The Spectator, 9 March 2002. 19. See also Sheil (2000), op. cit., pp. 71-81. 20. Ibid. See also Michael H. Granof & Stephen A. Zeff, 'Generally accepted accounting abuses', New York Times, 28 June 2002. 21. Pollock et. al., op. cit. 22. Seamus Ward, 'PFI is here to stay', BMJ 324:1178 (18 May 2002). 23. Melanie McFadyean & David Rowland ,'A costly free lunch', Guardian, 30 July 2002. For another horror story associated with schools and the UK's PFI scheme, see Francis Beckett, 'Private profit, public squalor', New Statesman, 15 July 2002. Nor is it clear how the social returns that are presently captured by schools in their roles as community centres are to be funded under PPPs. 24. See Walker & Walker, op. cit., p. 178. 25. John Quiggin, 'Private financing of public infrastructure', Dissent, Autumn-Winter 2002, p. 16. 26. Kenneth Davidson, 'Myths and mismanagement', Dissent, Spring 2002, pp. 2-7. 27. See Christopher Sheil, 'Superficial appeal of PPPs falling apart', Australian Financial Review, 24 May 2002. 28. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, University of Chicago Press edition, Chicago 1976 [1776], Vol. 2, pp. 157-8. Smith's famous text can be read almost entirely as a polemic against exclusive privilege, and perhaps PPPs are best defined as a form of 'neo-mercantilism'.