BEWARE OF GATS – PRIVATISING THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC SERVICES
In secret, governments are negotiating the end to all not -for - profit public services.
In less than two years, 130 plus governments expect to quietly sign an agreement called GATS – General Agreement on Trade in Services. This binding and irreversible treaty will lay government services open for international tender. Some public services are next in line for the World Trade Organisation’s corporate battering-ram. Global corporations have been successful in persuading governments everywhere that the pursuit of corporate profit and the public good are one and the same. This greater corporate access to many areas of public life has not necessarily resulted in an increase in quality of services. Sometimes, the less well off citizens’ access to services has often been reduced or even eliminated.
Services provision is the fastest-growing sector in international trade. It employs 72% of Australians and offers rich pickings for canny corporations. Of all the public services, health, education and water are shaping up to be the most lucrative. Global expenditures on water services now exceeds $1 trillion every year. Education is worth $2 trillion and health care is worth $3.5 trillion. Since transnationals avoid paying their fair share of tax; these services are becoming increasingly hard for governments to provide. The free-wheeling capitalist US economy typifies the lack of public service provision which GATS will unleash all over the world.
Many of the GATS and WTO policies are designed to increase transnational domination of world markets.
In the US, health care has already become a huge business. Americans spend twice as much on health as a percentage of their GNP as Australians. Meanwhile, investment houses like Merrill Lynch are already predicting that public education will be globally privatized over the next decade. They say there is an untold amount of profit to be made when this happens. The EU recently announced that every publicly run school in Europe must be twinned with a corporation by the end of the decade. In universities around the world, winning the support of big business has now become a common strategy. GATS also has the potential to affect environmental services and natural resource protection. Our national park, wildlife, river and forest services could all become contested.
In recent times, parts of the third world have been coerced to dismantle their public infrastructures under IMF imposed programs, in order to be eligible for debt relief. GATS is seen by some observers to be a rejigged version of the defunct MAI Treaty.
AUSTRALIA’S GATS COMMITMENT