yeah - about as public as the goings-on in Nauru and other places of "National Security" :1zhelp:
Lawyers! Who needs them!
That's a theory that isn't always borne out in practice.
The public sector has its productivity downsides but it also does have its good points and they tend to be overlooked in neo-liberal economic thinking which promotes privatisation as the answer to everything.
Public sector - tends to do things properly in terms of the actual physical things being done. Downside is the "cant get sacked" aspect which leads to some "problem" employees if the relevant department isn't well run. Some departments are run well in that regard but others aren't.
Private sector - tends to work efficiently as such (not always) but is often doing things that are fundamentally inefficient to start with because that's the best way to make a profit through generating future work.
Been there, seen both and in my opinion there's good and bad points in both but it was never true that private could always do it cheaper.
A public servant doing physical work is motivated to do it right so that they don't have to do it again. They get paid the same regardless so may as well get it right rather than having to come back.
Private sector makes more profit if the work lasts 5 years instead of 10. That way they get to come back twice as often, doing each job at 20% less than if public, but the end result is it costs 60% more over the long term (figures are hypothetical but are order of magnitude correct in my experience).
Then there's that old trick of pushing the costs up. Private operator approaches government with a promise of huge savings, say 50%. Whatever it is then gets privatised. Then the private operator waits a year or two and starts ratcheting up the prices. A decade later the price is higher than where it started but work that used to last 20 years now lasts half that time at best because they did everything at the lowest possible cost in the short term in order to maximise profit.
With the "in house" experience long gone, government now has no choice other than to keep handing your taxes over to the private "provider" of the service no matter what the cost. And don't kid yourself that competition will keep prices down. Sometimes yes, but it's hard to keep the quality up and if it's something specialised then in practice it ends up with at most two or three private suppliers and they're not going to send each other broke that's for sure. Easy money!
The supposedly "inefficient" state-run utilities gave Australia the third cheapest electricity in the OECD, beaten only by Canada and NZ with their large hydro resources. Now Australia is among the most expensive places on earth when it comes to power and there's more cost rises to come. That's the wonders of competition and privatisation for you right there and it hasn't worked. Theory says it works, practice says it's a disaster that has undermined our entire economic competitiveness.
Don't even mention gas, that's probably the biggest blunder I'll see in my lifetime. A key competitive advantage completely thrown away and the private operators aren't even making much profit in doing so. Incredible.
I think I have seen it pop up on my Facebook newsfeed a few time and when I read the comments, most seemed to indicate it didn't work as advertised. If I see it again, I will post here.
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