There were complaints of closure to Hospital cafes owned by the government recently.
The outrage was along the lines of, ‘Theyre closing the only place you can buy resonably priced food’ and ‘this is a kick in the guts in a cost of living crisis’ etc.
Those cafes ran at a sizeable deficit which the Gov is ultimately trying to claw back to get more money for frontline workers.
Damned if you do and all that…
The tender process can remain the same it’s just that local companies are preferred when they can provide the service.
No point in bribing someone from the LHD when it’s NSW Health and the Health Minister who signs off on the the contract.
Are you suggesting that the backhanders don’t occur higher up and everything is above board when it’s the multinationals end up with a monopoly on the services?
For over 40 years Richmond Waste collected the waste.
Suez appeared on the scene some 5-10 years ago and approached local businesses with contract proposals that massively undercut Richmond Waste. There was no way that Suez could provide the service at the price they quoted without making a loss but they could do it because they can afford to take a loss to run a small business out.
Some businesses took up the offer, most declined though due to the years of quality service from Richmond Waste and also out of loyalty.
Within the first week after the first flood Richmond Waste provided skip bin services free of charge and replaced the industrial bins. By the time the second flood came around Suez still hadn’t replaced their industrial bins nor did they help out at all with the clean up.
While the Government makes an initial saving by signing the cheaper contract, by giving these contracts to the same companies they lose out as local businesses close down or lay off staff and farmers get out of the industry.
This results in less money being spent back into the local economy, more businesses closing, services dwindling and ultimately the death of the smaller towns.
It really can’t. The whole tender process is designed to squeeze the government budget down, which the big players can only achieve in the long term by delivering a shit service, which then further justifies handing services over to the private sector altogether. It’s privatisation by a thousand cuts.
I was talking about someone in the LHD getting a kickback for giving the contract to a mate which was the corruption issue that Dibo raised.
Local companies would still tender to the NSW Government and that’s who would approve it, not the LHD.
Like it or not, the private sector needs to provide many of these services because Local, State and Federal Governments have got out of them. Local companies should be preferred if they can match the level of service that the multinationals can.
Unfortunately the NSW Government has changed the conditions around the tendering process and now require business to be able to service a larger area than just local. It is a condition literally designed to force the little guy out of the market and directly favours the big companies.
There should be someone from the LHD on the tender evaluation panel. Would be crazy not to be. That being said, that may be just one voice out of four.
It’s pretty fucked in govt procurement at the moment either way, you’ll find established incumbents who have had contracts for many years being dumped for new players just to shake it up so departments aren’t accused of having favourites, especially where contracts have been rolled over or awarded outside of a competitive process previously.
A lot of arse covering.
I don’t disagree with local procurement policies at all. But this is the heart of the problem. The concept of tendering to the highest bidder, rather than awarding contracts based on government policies where the service can’t be provided by government, is part of the broader government policy of getting out of providing services.
As expected, the cashless gaming “trail” was an absolute farce and a waste of $3.5 million dollars. They only managed to get proper data from 2 individuals. The trail had over 200 people registered, but only 2 used the app and gambled enough times to actually give statistical data. The main findings are essentially:
They need to make the cashless system compulsory., but allow cash to be put onto cards…
Congratulations to Labor on a complete waste and discovering something a 10 year old would be able to tell them
This feels like the only outcome that could ever have come out of a limited trial of this type where gamblers can just move onto the pub down the road and not faff about with some card.
Whether it was always the desired outcome…?
Even though it was an epic failure, at least they tried I guess. As long as they learn from it and apply it to the next program
Is this one of those things where the trial provides tokenistic message that some action has taken place towards positive change, in the face of no political will to take the hard medicine and actually do it properly/face up to donors, clubs nsw etc
What do you mean they tried? They took a proper trial that was set up by the Liberal government, watered it down and made it completely and utterly pointless. The fact that they need a trial is an even bigger joke. Sort out the software and role it out. You have a Police Commission that is telling us that billions of dollars are washed through the pokies, you have anti-gambling groups that are telling us that it’ll help control a ridiculously destructive addiction, yet you have a state government that’s sucking the dick of those that are making millions out of the pokies.
A proper cashless system would require ID to be registered and limits of the amount you can gamble per day. How is it honestly that hard?
Labour certainly seem captured by the gambling lobby, both state (at least in NSW) & federal
How would you limit how much someone can gamble?
if they go with the cashless card it’d be ridiculously easy to have limits. The current system can allow you to set your own limits, it just that you can go over that limit and just get a bit of an alarm on your phone
Sorry, I misread what you wrote.
I thought you meant that the Government would set the limit.
That’s exactly what should be done though. Either a time limit or amount limit should 100% be set by the government, at the very least for pokies.
ClubsNSW are a monster lobby group. It’s no accident that clubs are open 7 days a week until 6am.
I don’t know. Did they?
So you’re advocating for the Government to set s limit on how you spend your money?
Go and do your RSA. There is a set of criteria that you use to give you the best possible set of identifiers that could indicate that someone is intoxicated.
Apply that set of criteria and when you are charged with serving an intoxicated person, the burden of innocence, not guilt, is applied to that charge.
How do I know that? I got done. (can tell you a story about what the prosecutor said afterwards)
RCG is a completely different story. How do you know how much money someone has? How much of that money do you know that they can afford to lose?
You’re opening a window on Government control of how you spend your own money.
Should fat people be restricted on the amount of money they spend on food?
Should race car drivers spend on fuel be restricted because of the carbon footprint?
The Commonwealth Bank just saw what happens when you try and tell people what they can do with their own money.
This happens in so many ways already - taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, laws against importing vapes, limits on cash deposits - so I really don’t get the Helen Lovejoy over people being allowed to spend their own money.
We are the worst per-capita gamblers on the planet. Australians lose more than $25 billion annually to the predators - a thousand dollars per person, worse per adult. We clearly need some drastic measures.
I’m personally in favour of a straight up ban on pokies outside of designated casinos, not cashless gambling. But isn’t that controlling how people spend their money, by denying them the opportunity to piss it up the wall at every pub or club?