The argument was that state owned could end up being the same as state regulated. The government are people too, they might also have made mistakes that caused catastrophic bushfires - instead of greedy and incompetent it would be lazy and incompetent. The dry bush is a significant part of the equation.

Just looking over the Wikipedia page [0] it appears PG&E has a guaranteed rate of profit and monopoly status over certain aspects of the infrastructure. The problem with governments owning businesses is that they don't respond to market signals in the form of profits. Under this regulation, PG&E is also buffered from needing to respond to market signals in the form of profits.

The intellectual justification for privatising anything is to expose it to the need to fight to make profits which then enforces a sort of discipline on resource use. Regulation that privatises a company then shields it from the need to try hard to succeed is pretty much strictly worse than nationalising.

That is a likely perspective from the sort of person who believes that the political system is bad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...