It shouldn’t be too hard to explain why spending must slow

"Walking around the building, I saw row upon row of employees spending large amounts of their day engrossed in personal activities while … employees often spend large parts of their days in unproductive meetings. Staff are provided exceedingly generous income and benefits compared to commercial standards for the same roles.

"This in itself contributes to an inefficient workplace, as once people are in jobs that provide pay and benefits well in excess of market conditions, employees are more likely to cling to jobs."

It has been reported that a ­review into network costs commissioned by the Newman gov­ernment found "647 staffers earned more than 1½ times their base salary across the three state-owned network businesses - Ergon, Energex and Powerlink".

Twenty-seven staff doubled their base pay in 2011-12, which was argued to spawn "lower levels of productivity". "No forced redundancy" ­clauses exist throughout the government corporations sector, which means staff are almost unsackable.

Stories are similar in NSW.

George Maltabarow was chief of state-owned Ausgrid between 2004 and 2012.

In this period, average annual household electricity bills rose from $900 to $1925.

Maltabarow argued that two-thirds of the increases in prices were linked to over-investment in the electricity networks, the rest from increased operating expenditure and other costs, including above-inflation wage rises, large overtime bills and other perks. Both are good reasons to privatise assets.

"The ETU (Electrical Trades Union) has been able to secure wage rises far in excess of those available to the wider community through industrial blackmail and attempting to intimidate management of government-owned networks," he said.

"They have maintained restrictive practices in successive award determinations, frustrated attempts to contract out construction and other services and now oppose privatisation through a scare campaign on prices."

The commonwealth undertook privatisation 20 years ago. That it is still contentious at state level is testament to the power of public service unions and the paucity of politicians to explain the problems of holding commercial assets in public hands.

The Abbott government's problems are analogous. It has serious work to do to have voters understand that the commonwealth, and the states for that matter, spends more money than it raises. And it raises more than it used to.

Slogans do not satisfy the voters' need to know why change is necessary.

They ask: "Please explain?"