Defending the Public Sector: The Evatt Report

Abstract

For a long time it has been widely agreed that public enterprises belonged in the public sector because they had social as well as commercial purposes-to provide universal access to an Australia-wide service (Telecom, Post), to underpin Government housing policies and enable intervention in the finance sector (the Commonwealth Bank), to provide competition for what would otherwise be a private sector monopoly (Australian Airlines). Laissez-faire economics has now captured the macro-economic policy agenda, excluding non-market objectives from consideration and tending to produce policies of deregulation and small government. Telecommunications has been privatized in Japan, the US and the UK, ..