You paid for it, you use it, you can't read it
A public-private partnership is a promise made with your assets and, usually, your money — a toll you'll pay, a payment stream out of the budget, or both. It is the one contract in your life you are most entitled to see, and the one you are least able to.
When a government signs a 30- or 50-year concession, the document that results is not a normal government record. Large parts of it — the payment schedule, the risk allocation, the compensation clauses, the "public sector comparator" that supposedly proved the deal was good value — are withheld from public release on the ground that they are commercially sensitive. The consortium's negotiating position, we are told, must be protected. The effect is that the terms of a deal made in your name, over an asset you already own, are decided out of your sight and cannot be checked by you, your local paper, or your MP. verified
This is not a footnote to privatisation. It is the mechanism that makes the rest of it possible. Every other page on this site — the tolls locked to rise, the risk that flows back to the public, the deals re-cut when the private side underperforms — depends on the fact that the paperwork stays sealed. You can't argue with a number you're not allowed to see.
The defence, and the catch inside it
There is a genuine argument for keeping some commercial detail confidential. It just happens to also do something very convenient for everyone who signed.
The official defence
"Commercial confidentiality protects taxpayers' negotiating position. If bidders knew exactly what the state would accept — its costs, its fallback, its walk-away price — future deals would cost the public more. Secrecy is protecting you."
The catch
It also conveniently prevents anyone checking whether the deal was any good. The same clause that hides your walk-away price hides the blowout, the sweetheart escalation and the quiet renegotiation — long after the negotiating is over and there is nothing left to protect but reputations.
Notice the sleight of hand. Protecting a live negotiation might justify sealing terms during bidding. It does not explain why the compensation formula, the risk split and the value-for-money working stay secret for the decades after signing, when the only thing confidentiality protects is the deal itself from scrutiny. A gag that outlives its stated purpose is doing a different job than the one on the label.
The centrepiece: WestConnex, in the dark
Australia's largest urban road project is the cleanest example: majority public money, and yet the numbers that decide what the public pays were withheld as commercially confidential.
On WestConnex, key contract details — including the toll compensation percentages and the calculations tied to vehicle usage — were kept from the public as "commercial-in-confidence," despite the project being majority publicly funded. The people who paid for most of the road were told that the terms governing what they'd be charged on it, and what the state might owe the operator, were none of their business. verified
Sources: WestConnex Action Group — WestConnex issues; reporting at New Matilda — the insider emails that show WestConnex in a new light (18 May 2016).
The Auditor-General, before a shovel hit the ground In December 2014 the NSW Auditor-General reviewed WestConnex's preliminary business case. The review was widely described as "scathing" — it criticised the lack of independent assurance, and flagged a conflict of interest inside Infrastructure NSW, which was both developing the WestConnex concept and providing assurance over it. The body checking the homework had helped write it. the 2014 review and its findings "scathing" is others' characterisation
Source: NSW Auditor-General, review of the WestConnex preliminary business case (December 2014). The word "scathing" is how the review was widely characterised in reporting and by critics — the underlying findings (absence of independent assurance; conflict of interest within Infrastructure NSW developing and assuring the concept) are the review's own. Further citations on Sources.
The distinction that matters: the auditor can see it, you can't
Here is the nuance that gets lost, and it's important to get right — because it changes what the fix has to be.
"Commercial-in-confidence" does not usually blind the auditor-general. Auditors-general typically hold statutory access powers that let them see the confidential material — the full contract, the payment schedule, the comparator — in order to do their job. When an auditor-general reviews a PPP, they are generally not reading the redacted version you get. verified
The transparency gap is not primarily between the auditor and the deal. It is between the deal and you — the public and the Parliament. The auditor can read it; you and your MP often can't, and even when the auditor has seen it, the confidential terms usually cannot be published. So the accountability runs through a single official, once, in a report that can only describe what it can't show you. Everyone else — the people paying, the members they elected — is left outside the door.
What the auditor-general can do
Access the full, unredacted contract under statutory powers; test value-for-money against the comparator; report that something is wrong — in general terms.
What you and your MP can't do
Read the payment terms, the risk allocation or the compensation clauses; publish them; independently check the auditor's conclusion; or see what was traded away in a renegotiation.
This distinction cuts both ways, and honesty requires stating both. It's a check that the system does work isn't nothing — but a single, non-publishable review is a thin thread to hang a 50-year public liability on. The problem isn't that no one can see the deal. It's that almost no one can, and the many millions who fund and use it never will.
Why value-for-money can't be checked from outside
The entire justification for paying a private consortium more than the government's own borrowing rate is that the deal represents "value for money." That claim rests on three things — and all three are the parts most reliably redacted.
| To check the deal, the public would need… | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| The public sector comparator What it would have cost to build/run it publicly | Withheld or heavily redacted as commercially sensitive |
| The risk allocation Which risks the private side truly carries | Buried in confidential schedules; the "transfer" can't be tested |
| The payment terms What the state pays, and pays if things go wrong | Sealed — including compensation formulae like WestConnex's |
Redact those three and the value-for-money case becomes unfalsifiable: it cannot be independently checked, only asserted. For two decades, auditors-general across Australia have raised versions of this same complaint — that confidentiality provisions defeat the scrutiny the "value for money" test is supposed to survive. the recurring auditor-general criticism
"Shaped to support a privatisation agenda" It isn't only roads. Academic work on Victoria's electricity privatisation documents accounting figures being characterised as shaped to support a privatisation agenda — and obscured behind commercial-in-confidence provisions, so the numbers used to justify the sale couldn't be independently interrogated. academic characterisation
Source: "Beyond commercial in confidence: Accounting for power privatisation in Victoria" (academic paper). The phrasing about figures being shaped to support a privatisation agenda is that paper's characterisation, offered here as scholarship, not as a settled finding of fact.
A deal you can't read is a deal you can't consent to
This site argues for one fix that runs under every page: that decisions made with public money and public assets should require the public's actual, informed consent — not a mandate assumed once every four years and then spent on deals nobody was shown.
Secrecy isn't a side-issue to consent. It's the core of it. Consent means nothing if you can't see what you're consenting to. A contract stamped commercial-in-confidence is, by design, a decision made in your name, with your assets, that you are structurally prevented from evaluating. You cannot approve, reject, or hold anyone to account for terms you're not allowed to read. The secrecy doesn't just hide a bad deal — it removes the very possibility of consent, and hands it to a handful of people who signed on your behalf and then sealed the receipt.
That's why "commercial-in-confidence" belongs on this site next to the escalation clauses and the revolving door. It is the enabling condition for all of it: the reason a fifty-year public liability can be created in a room you're not in, described only in general terms, and defended with numbers you're never shown.
The consent argument is set out across the deal and the fix pages. See also who was in the room: who cashes in.
Seen a redacted PPP contract?
Confidentiality clauses work because so few of the actual documents ever surface. Contracts, side deeds, compensation formulae, renegotiation memos, the comparator that was quietly overtaken — most of it sits in filing systems marked commercial-in-confidence, seen by a handful of officials and advisers. If you've held one, you know something the public that paid for it isn't allowed to.
We work with whistleblowers. Have you seen a redacted PPP contract, a compensation clause, a value-for-money comparator, or the paperwork from a renegotiation done behind the curtain? We handle documents carefully and protect sources. Reach us at whistle@theradicalparty.com. The deal was done in your name — help us read it back to the people who paid for it.
Cross-references: How the deal works · The toll roads · citations and sources on Sources.