What do we actually get from having a private company run the service though (in the case of Metro Trains), instead of just employing everyone directly?

What exactly do we get by having private companies do the retail side of the NBN? Instead of just having the NBN provide the service at cost (which they’re already doing, and it’s just being sold on to us by private companies who repackage the bandwidth and usage in different ways). Same logic for gas and electricity (in Victoria, not all states do this). What are we actually getting by having it repackaged and sold on to us with a markup?

Seems to me were unnecessarily paying an extra margin to account for profit. We could just employ those permanent workers directly.

Water (in Victoria) corporations are actually government-owned corporatised water authorities. Which again makes no sense and we get nothing from having them being administered separately.

Here’s an interesting video on the initial privatisation of the metropolitan trains and trams under Kennett, which was an absolute disaster: youtube.com/watch?v=34fGlurh42A