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Australia
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Australia
This page considers Australian utilicoms.
It covers -
introduction
Australian utilities have been less adventurous than their
overseas peers – or merely more sensible –
in moving beyond their traditional businesses to offer
connectivity on a wholesale and retail basis. In essence
they have stuck to their knitting, with the result that
there are no resounding successes (and few high profile
failures) in the delivery of dial-up and broadband internet,
landline or mobile phone services, or cable television.
Connectivity developments have been driven by telecommunication
sector specialists, rather than by providers of gas, water
or electricity. From an overseas perspective we have not
seen the emergence of major utilicoms, particularly enterprises
that gain a substantial portion of their revenue from
providing connectivity or content. That is likely to be
the case in future at both the wholesale and retail (eg
internet access for households and SMEs) levels.
The provision of electricity, gas, water and wastewater
services in Australia for much of the past 150 years was
a state/territory and local government responsibility.
By the 1960s, for example, most businesses and households
used electricity that was generated by a state government
agency (typically in a handful of large-scale plants),
with distribution direct by that agency or via a municipal/regional
council. Water for domestic use was similarly reticulated
by municipal governments, often from storage facilities
constructed and managed by a state government agency.
Much supply was ostensibly on a cost recovery basis –
with the providers generally enjoying a monopoly - rather
than to give the government a true commercial rate of
return on investment. Agencies often gained substantial
revenue and profits that equalled or surpassed some overseas
commercial peers, albeit with broad acceptance by the
community on the basis that gains were used to fund the
provision of services such as roads, schools, parks, police
and parking inspectors.
In practice particular agencies gained/exploited an autonomy
that gave them substantial political power. The Hydro
Electric Commission in Tasmania, which as Aynsley Kellow
notes in Transforming Power: The Politics of Electricity
Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996) was
driven by an engineering rather than consumer service
focus, was often referred to as the true government of
Tasmania and rivalled the North American agencies described
by Robert Caro in The Power Broker: Robert Moses &
the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf 1974) and Neil
Freeman in The Politics of Power: Ontario Hydro and
Its Government, 1906-1995 (Toronto: Uni of Toronto
Press 1996).
studies
As noted on the preceding page, there have been few major
studies of utilicoms or indeed of the evolution of the
Australian utilities sector. Works of particular importance
are Kellow's Transforming Power: The Politics of Electricity
Planning (1996) and The
Politics of Power: Inside Australia's Electric Utilities
(Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 1988) by Stephen Rosenthal
& Peter Russ.
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