On Mike Baird’s exit

Martin Butterfield writes: Re. “Baird’s resignation fires starting gun on NSW Liberal factional warfare” (yesterday). Luke Foley’s image isn’t ‘foggy’: it is transparent due to his invisibility. If Baird’s successor was to be selected on the grounds of assistance to the Liberal Party over the past few years Foley should be odds-on.

Wayne Cusick writes: Re. “Mike Baird’s secret privatisation strategy” (yesterday). Selling public utilities that are monopolies is bad. The electricity grid is a monopoly – there isn’t a parallel system which provides competition. There was an article in Crikey in the past few days detailing how energy distribution asset owners are ripping off the community by charging higher prices, particularly in natural gas but also in electricity. It also makes perfect sense to sell off public assets so that the government can invest in building more assets, which will usually be of lower value. And them sell them off so that the government can build an even lower value asset – etc. NOT.