Childcare is just the latest failure of Australia’s privatisation push. It’s time for an ideology overhaul

‘For-profit corporations have no place, or at most a peripheral place, in the provision of basic human services, including health, education and childcare,’ John Quiggin writes. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

A series of ABC 7.30 reports tells a familiar story of failure in human services. Inadequate staffing, dangerous incidents brushed under the carpet, ineffective regulation and, at the back of it all, for-profit businesses, either ASX-listed or financed by private equity.

This time it’s childcare but the same problems have emerged in vocational education, aged care, prisons, hospitals and many other services. Every time the answer we get is the same. More and better regulation, we are told, will make the market work better, allowing competition and consumer choice to work their magic.