The more things stay the same, the more things stay the same

Some of my facebook friends have been joining this facebook group called 'Stop Medibank Private being put into private hands.' Which confuses me, because I kind of sort of thought that Medibank Private was in private hands. It's all there in the title, see - 'Medibank Private'. Privatising Medibank Private seems to me to be a process somewhat akin to, say, aquifying water, or gassifying air.

About two years ago, I do vaguely recall a radio discussion on this very possibility, that the (then) Howard Government could privatise Medibank Private. The explanation of the economic structure of the Medibank Private organisation, and its history, was sufficiently arcane, elaborate, and confusing that I started wishing for the explanation to be unexplained again. At the end of the discussion, I was actually sure of much less about the whole issue than I was before. It actually sounded like Medibank Private had been created(?)* private, but now the Howard Government was going to privatise it again? Or something?

Then again, in its own crazy way it made a lot of sense. Maybe by that stage the Libs had run out of things to privatise, so by then they decided to go on and re-privatise the things that were already private. So they could start off with Medibank Private, and carry on reprivatising public transport, Qantas, Telstra... As a corrollary, Labor could run campaigns against private assets being put into private hands, and instead argue for taking public assets out of public hands, and putting them in other public hands.

I was actually planning to do another political post tonight about how the MSM misrepresents Tony Abbott - no, really! it does! - but I couldn't be arsed. Night, all.

*Actually, please insert a (?) after every word in my elaborate non-explanation of the previous elaborate non-explanation.