There’s something quite ironic about the NSW Government announcing a hotch potch and conditional partial privatisation program for its electricity sector on the same day the Singapore Government was left with 100% of $8.3 billion worth of energy sector distribution assets.

But don’t for a moment think that Singapore Inc has got indigestion as they simultaneously announced a $US9 billion bailout of Europe’s most prestigious investment bank, UBS.

While Singapore knows how to save and invest, the same can’t be said for Australian governments. And when Labor Governments embrace privatisation it usually means they’ve run out of money. Morris Iemma’s sweetheart deal with the unions is a classic of the genre.

When it comes to privatisation, no Australian state has given away so much value to so few as NSW – but now they’ve come up with another contorted compromise that will probably just repeat debacles such as the sale of the NSW State Bank.

John Fahey and Peter Collins banned the big banks from bidding, provided a bad debt indemnity and imposed ridiculous guarantees on jobs and branches – all of which resulted in a net return of $250 million to taxpayers from Colonial Mutual in 1996, which then onsold the business for more than $2 billion to the Commonwealth Bank five years later.

Iemma seems to have learned nothing as he ponders public floats of energy assets – which usually produce lower returns for government vendors – and ridiculously generous job guarantees, all of which will just lower the value of the assets.

The NSW unions have lived high on the hog for decades on fat and lazy power utilities which have been incompetently managed by successive governments, including through the loss of many billions on flawed trading strategies after the competitive market evolved in the mid-1990s.

By way of contrast, Victoria has never looked back from the $30 billion it pocketed from energy trade sales from 1994 until 1999. The lights have stayed on, consumers got lower real prices, the state recovered its AAA credit rating, billions were channelled into new infrastructure projects and there’s no desperate need to build new coal-fired power plants.

The reason that NSW has been out-negotiated on more tollroad deals than any other Australian government is because it locked up too much capital in the power industry and therefore didn’t have the cash for more essential spending on road, rail, hospitals and the like.

In now releasing that capital, it is a scandal if they don’t structure it in a way to maximise the proceeds.

Have a listen to Stephen Mayne’s rave about NSW power privatisation in today’s farewell chat with 702 ABC Sydney’s Virginia Trioli and check out the expanded power privatisation list which goes right back to 1991.