The western Australian example just demonstrates why petrostates are wealthy - if you have big energy resources you can make stuff cheaper, surprise! And realistically all that's really happening there is west Australia is effectively imposing a tax on gas profits to subsidize the grid. There's no magic success here - just a redistribution of gas profits to electricity consumers.
I don't actually think the Australian grid is a good example of privatisation failure. There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything aside from the marching cry of the left.
> There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything
Did we gain anything? I ask in earnest, I don't know.
I can guess that the cost of running, maintenance, etc are now "not a cost of the state", but the cost doesn't just disappear, it was always on the consumer via tax or bills (or tax and bills, hopefully in a way that sums to the same cost!).
In theory, you remove government overhead. Government bureacracies are infamous for expanding without the requirement to make a profit as a constraint.
As it pertains to power, People tend to promote government as a means to make it cheaper - but this is sort of a fallacy - the only way the government can do it cheaper is if it's operationally more efficient to a significant degree. I don't see how a government achieves this. Private energy generators are usually not very profitable - the people making money were commodity producers, recently, not electricity generators.
I don't actually think the Australian grid is a good example of privatisation failure. There's little proof that we have meaningfully lost anything aside from the marching cry of the left.