Atlassian Man and the Perils of Privatisation
You can also catch my writing at Politicom, A Sense of Place Magazine, The Spectator Australia, TCW Defending Freedom (formerly the Conservative Woman), Quadrant, and The Freedoms Project. Older articles appeared at On Line Opinion and Newsweekly. Everything is at my Academia.edu page. Including my PhD. All free.
The article that appears here was published at Politicom. A version of Klaus’s Covid Kids will appear at TCW.
Atlassian Man and the Perils of Privatisation
Talk about chickens coming home to roost. Back in the dim, distant 1980s, thinkers and associated cheer squadders on the right and their political representatives were all hot for privatisation. They adopted as their guru a Brit called Madsen Pirie, a name probably not known to anyone under fifty or so now. Pirie was routinely brought out to Australia to speak to the evils of big government and government ownership and management of infrastructure and services. Not unexpectedly, his heroine was Margaret Thatcher, the personification in politics of small government and free markets.
While privatisation was, at best, a mixed success at the time, it is only in the twenty-first century that we are all discovering that selling off the silverware was a huge mistake, one that is about to cost us very, very dearly. When selling off government assets was a thing, there were assumptions about the efficiency of the private sector and the inefficiency of government that were probably true. But there were also unstated assumptions about the good will of the private sector in relation to the management of national assets and of the ability of government to ensure the safety of the community. (Governments are now said to be very concerned for our “safety”, are they not?)
Well, that was all before governments starting selling core assets to the Chinese Communist Party and now to jumped-up, millennial (or very near to it), hippie-looking, greenie billionaires pledged to deplete our energy supplies.
Enter one Matthew Cannon-Brookes, a “got-lucky techie”, about to be responsible for the further destruction of the centre of Sydney (see main picture) and of Australia’s energy supply. Cannon-Brookes is a tech billionaire, the co-founder of a firm called Atlassian. Atlassian is a software company that self-describes as follows:
G’day, we’re Atlassian. We make tools like Jira and Trello that are used by thousands of teams worldwide. And we’re serious about creating amazing products, practices, and open work for all teams.
https://www.atlassian.com/
Typical Big Tech lingo. You read what they say about themselves and still don’t know what they actually do or make.
Cannon-Brookes has joined forces with a Canadian private equity outfit called Brookfield to make a bid to buy AGL, with the subsequent intention of getting AGL out of the fossil fuel business as soon as possible.
Terry McCrann reports:
Even a Green loon like NSW’s laughingly titled ‘Energy’ Minister, Matt Kean, can see that 2025 is all-too close to now for comfort; heck, it’s even possible that he could still be in the job when the blackouts and brownouts start. Thank you Mike for also announcing that – at least, you think - there are big dollars to be made in Australia’s blackout and brownout future, off the back of real pain for 26m Australians. You and Brookfield are not putting - or more accurately, being prepared to put - $8bn on the table, to play Father Christmas to Aussie consumers.
You want to and intend to take more dollars out of their pockets for the same amount of electricity they’d be getting – when of course the wind is blowing and the batteries haven’t run flat, and they can actually get it – not fewer dollars.
Remember, as you read this, that Australia still gets 70 per cent of its energy from coal. Not for much longer. Naturally, the NSW Treasurer (notwithstanding Terry McCrann’s comment and the likelihood that Matt Kean must now be getting a little nervous) and Cannon-Brookes are on the same page in terms of green energy fantasies. As Advance Australia points out:
Poll after poll have shown that mainstream Australians are not suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ like billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, ‘scientist’ Tim Flannery and Mr Kean.
https://www.advanceaustralia.org.au/this_bloke_is_in_the_wrong_party
Two things are striking – that the NSW Government and its Energy Minister (and Treasurer) are in sync with the greens on energy policy (as we know) and that the green ideologues are totally at odds with we-the-people on this issue of critical importance.
We are now all about to pay big-time for the climate anxiety of Matthew Cannon-Brookes. He is of the woke generation that has found a way to reconcile being filthy rich with adopting every leftist cause going. No doubt MCB is triple jabbed and proud of it. Better still, it is part of the sign-on team for the Covid Bio-digital State. As InnovationAus notes:
Australian tech darling Atlassian is among the five private companies that helped the federal government build its COVID-19 contact tracing app.
Atlassian, the collaboration and communication software giant, is understood to have assisted with the initial setting up of the project, and technical aspects with its development.
The company also worked with Facebook to set up the government’s official WhatsApp information channel. This work was done on a pro-bono basis by Atlassian.
Atlassian co-chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes has been a vocal supporter of the contact tracing app, urging other tech founders and workers to back it and encourage others to download it.
“Commend the government on some smart privacy and security choices (data deleted after 21 days, open source code, AWS in Australia, sensible sec practices etc). They won’t get it all right – and we as a tech community can help them. Find a bug and help get them closed,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said in a post on Hacker News.
“Fight the misinformation. Remind them how little time they think before they download dozens of free, adware crap games that are likely far worse for their data and privacy than this ever would be.”
Naturally. Fight the misinformation! The data sharing is fine. Trust the Government and Big Tech!
https://www.innovationaus.com/atlassian-and-the-covidsafe-team/
The Guardian notes, no doubt approvingly:
Cannon-Brookes, a renewable energy investor and vocal advocate for greater action on the climate crisis, has previously expressed an interest in backing clean energy assets to replace AGL’s ageing Liddell coal plant, which is due to shut next year.
The Guardian also notes that Matt Kean has simply said that “it is a commercial decision”. No barriers there, then, from Pontius Kean. He himself wants to get rid of the coal industry, and with it, the energy security of the people of New South Wales. Go for gold! The two Matthews are sympatico.
Where the Guardian and its readers see a huge “greenhouse gas emitter”, normal people see “energy provider”. These are two different worlds, populated on the one hand by people going about their daily business of earning a living and enjoying modest creature comforts, and on the other, Davos Man, content in the knowledge that the Matthew Cannon-Brookes of the world now own AND run the show, and damned be the working classes and associated deplorables.
For an explanation of Davos Man, see:
Of course, Cannon-Brookes is one of the happy brigade that advocates green energy relentlessly AND invests massively in it. Think Al Gore. Win-win. In Cannon-Brookes’ case, it is the Sun Cable project, naturally involving the World Economic Forum’s preferred global model of public-private partnership.
The $22 billion Sun Cable venture that aims to export solar power from the outback to Singapore has taken another significant step forward by mapping the first leg of its sub-sea mega cable and signing an agreement with the NT government to coordinate final approval of the project.
You can see at work both the lies told and the self-serving propaganda spun by the rich, green investor class and their power through investment to change energy outcomes globally:
But Cannon-Brookes said blaming renewables [for] the energy crisis raging across Europe was like blaming the fireman who turns up to put out the fire, portraying this as the “last gasp of a dying [fossil fuel] industry” that would no longer attract the capital it needs because customers don’t want its products and investors therefore see it as too risky.
Indeed, Cannon-Brookes suggested that surging energy prices would speed up the shift to renewables in Europe, citing Boris Johnson’s recent decision to phase out fossil fuels by 2035 in Britain as an example.
The fireman putting out the fire? Wow. Talk about driving a narrative. Fossil fuels are only experiencing their “last gasp” – that much MCB is right about – because rich, green investors (like Brookfield) who are meant to be looking after our money, have decided to put their chips on “sustainability”. To crush the hopes of ordinary people with their market power. For Davos Man, a virtuous circle. For the deplorables, who, as we know from Ottawa, Canberra and Wellington, are “terrorists” who want only the freedom to live normal lives, a miserable, brownout future of cold winters and hot summers.
(Boris Johnson, of course, is just about the world’s greatest politician-spruiker for the green energy set. No wonder the MCBs of this world love him, even as Britons experience the kind of routine blackouts and brownouts that will define their gruesome futures. And ours, too, if the Matt Keans get their way).
The conference at which Cannon-Brookes was quoted also featured Kean and Angus Taylor. There were no surprises in whose direction MCB found himself having sympathy. Green energy doubters like Taylor are obstacles in the path of Kean and Davos Man.
Back to the bid for AGL, a hostile takeover if ever there was one, proposed by a green twenty-first century version of Chainsaw Al Dunlap bent on buying a company in order to destroy its core business. The Australian Financial Review points out, succinctly, in its Chanticleer headline:
Three megatrends collide in Cannon-Brookes, Brookfield’s AGL bid …
The speed of the energy transition, the rise and rise of private capital and the emergence of billionaire activists are all at play in the offer.
A perfect storm, utterly unforeseen back in the day when many of us thought we could trust the private sector to behave well with the core resources of the people. The free market system and ideology rely on private actors behaving well. Now we seem to have both big and awful government itself behaving badly but also giving away the things it should keep, and awful private companies behaving just as badly. And with unspeakable consequences. At least we can still throw bad governments out. (Conservatives understand that a functioning society requires restrained and ordered liberty, not unconstrained markets and faith and hope that actors entrusted with strategic assets will have the morals, a sense of the national interest and the spine to always act well).
The impact of all this on Australia’s energy supply? Here is Terry McCrann, providing some much-needed context in the light of the decision by Origin Energy to hasten the shutdown of one of its, and our, core power assets:
The scale and comprehensiveness of the utter electricity and broader domestic energy disaster we are sleepwalking into is not even dimly comprehended.
This was rather neatly captured in the headlines at the non-insane end of the media spectrum in reaction to the Eraring closure announcement.
That’s to say, the tiny sliver of media outside the entirety of the ABC, the Nine metropolitan newspaper duo, the Guardian of course, commercial free-to-air TV and radio, and the entirety of social media.
“Coal shutdown risks bill shock.”
“Plan needed for exit of thousands of coal workers: unions.”
“Electricity shock: transition to clean energy will be rocky.”
If only it was going to be that easy.
Consumers having to pay somewhat more to keep their aircons on. A few thousand workers having to, for want of a better word, re-skill as Amazon warehouse workers or learning to code. With just the odd bump on the road.
Err, what about permanent blackouts and rolling brownouts or some other form of sophisticated “smart meter” rationing? Indeed “electricity passports”, like you-know-what passports?
Origin Energy was privatized on the watch of one Kristina Keneally, soon (perhaps) to be our Foreign Minister.
The climate change fantasy (shared of course by the same Kristina) is now core business (literally) for the private equity behemoths who run the world. It only became apparent that the bad guys were going to win the climate wars when it became crystal clear that the Vanguards, Blackrocks and Statestreets of the world had gone green.
Brookfield Australia’s website notes:
Brookfield Asset Management is a global alternative asset manager that invests in long-life, high-quality assets and businesses in more than 30 countries around the world. In Australia, Brookfield has a large business that consists of a diverse real estate, infrastructure and private equity portfolio across key cities.
Note “infrastructure”. The potential sell-out of AGL – the Atlassian pitch remains only a bid at the time of writing – is only possible because the dries of the 1980s bought the privatisation pitch, hook, line and sinker. It helped the cause of selling-off the silverware when governments (like that of Mike Baird, subsequently a banker) realised that they could make a quick billion or so bucks to line electoral war chests by offloading government assets. Armed with these bucketloads of cash, they were suddenly in a position to start bribing electors to keep voting for them. Hence all the grants schemes and associated corruption with which New South Welshmen and ICAC employees are painfully familiar. Politicians like John Barilaro and occasionally Gladys were forthright enough to admit what they were up to and that this was now the nature of the political process. Economists call this public choice theory. The rest of us call it pork barrelling, and, in the USA, log rolling (you support my hideous scheme and I will support yours).
What we think, of course, doesn’t matter in the world of Davos Man. One survey (quoted by Advance Australia) found that 70 per cent of us want energy security and affordability far more than reducing CO2 emissions. Fancy that. What CJ Hopkins refers to as “GloboCap” trumps the democratic will in these times.
https://www.advanceaustralia.org.au/this_bloke_is_in_the_wrong_party
Yes, infrastructure is now very much in play in the marketplace. Just like China owning many of our core strategic assets. We have been the proverbial slowly boiling frogs on this. One day we woke up – if, indeed, we actually have yet woken up – to find that we have sold off our precious infrastructure assets, the things that power our economy and our very way of life, to those who would do us irreparable harm. Whether they are Beijing-based megalomaniacs or Sydney-based rich do-gooders fixated on climate change. In each case, wanting to run the world.
These things would not have occurred if all those dries back in the 80s had not fallen for the privatisation mantra. 2020 vision and hindsight are wonderful things. Meanwhile, our nation goes down the plug-hole, along with the architectural beauty that was once downtown Sydney.
Paul Collits
22 February 2022