Last week, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews paraded his inner Lenin. He attacked Victoria’s privately owned coal generation businesses, claiming that they have taken ‘$23 billion in profits off pensioners, families and businesses’ and announced that they must be effectively driven out of business by state-owned alternatives.

Those facilities were sold to the private sector during the 1990s.

Jeff Kennett and his Treasurer Alan Stockdale pushed through the privatisations, which netted $11 billion for the generators and a similar sum for the electricity networks (plus $6 billion for the gas networks).