Read moreSo much of the world is casting around for a new map of reality, as this materialist/banking/spook/hydrocarbon warfare one has been found extremely wanting. The majority of the population is punchdrunk from the last twelve months of revelations of things you and I have always known. If you do or say nothing at this juncture, then eventually their drunkenness will wear off, replaced by the sobriety of the old materialist map.
shadow state
Read moreFour years later, Serco controls more than 20 centres across the nation and more than 10,500 people. The contract, constantly evolving with increasing boat arrivals, is now worth more than $1.86 billion. Other companies, such as G4S, Toll Group, Lohberger Engineering, Decmil and Canstruct are revelling in Labor’s pain. Stopping the boats will be bad for business.
One of the least examined aspects of refugee policy is the companies making a killing from the government’s failure to humanely process asylum seekers. John Howard accelerated outsourcing to the point where dozens of former detainees received compensation after being assaulted or psychologically damaged, while guards still experience post-traumatic stress because they never received appropriate training.
I read almost daily emails from former local employees of some of the world’s largest private prison companies. They tell me about their nightmares and say their managers during the early 2000s would allow detention centres to descend into crisis to force Canberra’s hand and guarantee more funds to “manage” the situation. “The budget for reassuring Australians is bottomless,” journalist David Marr has written.
The idea that private industry is more efficient and cheaper than the public sector is an illusion.
It is adherence to neo-liberal ideology that explains why Australia doesn’t want governments in the business of public services, war, mining and increasingly aid. The state is bad. Private enterprise is good.
Corporate lobbyists grease the wheels – witness the long line of Australian politicians on “study tours” to Britain being wined and dined by Serco, which hopes to persuade them to privatise yet another hospital or juvenile justice program – and the public is left short-changed, with lower standards of care.
During the writing of my new book, Profits of Doom, I spent time with a senior Serco manager who was disgusted with what he saw as his employer exploiting the government’s troubles over asylum seekers. He gave me internal documents that point to price-gouging, especially on ferrying refugees to different camps, understaffing, undertraining and disturbing levels of self-harm by detainees. In one month alone, January 2012, Serco made 65 per cent profit at Northern Territory’s Wickham Point, more than $2.5 million. British Serco management has a “colonial attitude” towards Australia, the source said, and make little effort to understand local conditions.
The company is rarely fined by the government for breaches because, I was told, managers are instructed not to report problems. The bottom line is all that matters. The contract between Serco and the government – I’ve seen one of the latest versions – indicates there are few formal mechanisms that are policed to ensure an accurate reporting regime.
The contract between Canberra and G4S, the British company running Manus Island, is even vaguer and dictates no independent audits. Former G4S manager Rod St George recently told SBS TV’s Dateline there had been rapes and physical abuses in the camps.
Yet the profits keep coming. Decmil won a $137 million contract in June to build a centre on Manus. Guess who will be rapt by the prospect of housing thousands more detainees if Rudd’s “PNG solution” is fully implemented?
My Serco source told me recently that both the company and the Immigration Department were in “chaos” and “can’t handle the boats”. Yet the corporation is reducing staff to “keep profits high”, he said.
Read moreThe firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.
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Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.
In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.
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I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.
Serco is among the biggest of them all. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at £302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fonder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.
The current chief executive of the global Serco Group is 49-year-old Chris Hyman, born in Durban, South Africa. His annual remuneration is around £700,000, plus bonuses; in 2011, the value of his total package rose 18%, to £1.86m (the company’s finance director had to slum it at £948,295).
In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”
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Work for the British government accounts for 40% of Serco’s revenues; to quote from the Daily Telegraph. “Without Serco, Britain would struggle to go to war”. That gives you some idea of how deeply its work penetrates the state, and how unthinkable any kind of corporate crisis would be.
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“Interestingly, we are looking at this. The National Audit Office is doing work around the development of quasi-monopoly private providers, which is the world we’re moving into. We don’t really understand the size of their empires. We’ve got to start getting hold of this. It’s a new phenomenon.”
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 