The Southern Tablelands Rail Users’ Group (STRUG) has failed to get a straight answer to this question for some months, having posed the issue during a meeting with Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian and MP for Goulburn Pru Goward in Sydney on May 21.

Follow up questions through Ms Goward’s office and the Minister’s own rail advisor Joe Stella, have so far yielded no answers either.

STRUG president Greg Price posed the question knowing that prior to the last State election, then Premier Barry O’Farrell said on the record that while he would “not privatise the rail passenger services in his first term of government”, he would look to privatise them in his second term, and that it would be an election policy.

“I now understand the government has advanced plans to vest passenger rail infrastructure into a State-owned corporation which in turn would lease it back to the operators, making it much easier to sell or franchise out in the future,” Mr Price told committee members last week.

“This would be largely in line with what the British government did with its passenger rail services some 30 years ago.

“The successful franchise operator would receive a government subsidy to make up the difference between the cost of providing the service and the income received if the service doesn’t cover the cost of running trains.

“Additionally the franchise operator would receive an amount for ‘reasonable profit’, usually around 15 per cent.

“However, the contract typically requires the franchisee to reduce the subsidy to zero over a specified time, say ten years. So, to make that reduction, they need to embark on a cost cutting exercise including staff cuts at stations and for cleaning etc.”

Mr Price said if the need for a subsidy could not be eliminated at that point, the franchisee goes to the government pointing out it can not be reduced any further and the ‘hand out’ would need to go up in future, or they will have to reduce the frequency of services in order to cut more costs.

“For the government, a service reduction would be seen as being unacceptable since it has already lauded the ‘benefits of privatisation’ so the parties agree to increase the subsidies.”

Mr Price believed the introduction of the Opal Card which (strangely) can not be purchased or topped up at railway stations, but rather at supermarkets or newsagencies, was a method of training people to be less reliant on station staff.

“Major supermarkets are already doing this with self serve checkouts while downgrading the level of personal service.”

Further strengthening the privatisation issue, STRUG secretary Leon Oberg told the meeting he had a copy of Aegis Consulting and Infrastructure Partnerships Australia’s joint 74 page glossy report “Franchising Passenger Rail Services in NSW’, released late 2012.

The authors of that document said immediate steps should begin toward an on-rail franchising demonstration project on Sydney’s ‘Sector One’, the Eastern Suburbs Illawarra line.

Significantly for Goulburn and southern line travellers, the authors insisted steps be taken to franchise “the operation and maintenance of the CountryLink (XPT and Explorer) network” (now part of NSW Trains), saying it provided ’a discrete system that is an early candidate for franchising’.

“It bears a range of similarities to interurban networks in Europe, North America and Asia which have been subject to successful franchising for many years,” they wrote.

The franchising issue will be put to STRUG’s public meeting at the Goulburn Soldiers’ Club on Monday starting 7.30pm.