In Australia, COVID-19 Has Exposed a Litany of Privatization Disasters
The coronavirus pandemic has preyed on weaknesses created by decades of austerity, confirming what socialists have consistently argued: privatization was a disaster.
A view of the normally busy Lydiard Street on August 21, 2020 in Ballarat, a city in Victoria, Australia. COVID-19 testing in Ballarat has increased as health authorities work to avoid the spread of coronavirus in regional Victoria. (Darrian Traynor / Getty Images)
The link between privatization and the second wave of COVID-19 in Australia’s southeastern state of Victoria is now indisputable. Subject to judicial inquiry, the outbreak has been traced in large part to breaches of quarantine security outsourced by the state government to private firms. Security workers were recruited through WhatsApp and employed as private contractors with minimal rights. They were neither trained properly nor supplied with adequate PPE (personal protective equipment).
After escaping quarantine, the outbreak tore through residential aged care. Already subject to a Royal Commission into endemic elder abuse, the largely privatized aged care sector has for years relied on casual workers with few rights, who are often forced to stretch themselves between multiple facilities.
As Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has acknowledged, between May and July, these conditions drove up to 80 percent of workplace transmissions of the coronavirus.
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