Latest news with #humanservices
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Childcare is just the latest failure of Australia's privatisation push. It's time for an ideology overhaul
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. The reason for this record of failure has been pointed out many times, and ignored just as often by policymakers. Businesses providing publicly funded or subsidised services can increase their profits in one of two ways. The hard way is to make technical or organisational innovations that provide a better service at lower cost. The easy way is to avoid meaningful improvements and approach rules with a 'tick a box' attitude. It would appear the easiest way of all, however, as claimed in the reports on childcare, is to cut corners on service quality, particularly in areas that are hard to check. Another favoured strategy is 'cream-skimming' – providing services where the regulatory setup yields high margins while leaving the public or non-profit sector to deal with the intractable problems. All of these strategies were employed on a huge scale to exploit VET Fee-Help, the vocational education and training scheme that represented the first big push towards for-profit provision of human services, beginning in 2009. Fee-Help was a disaster. Before it was scrapped in 2017 it swallowed billions of dollars of public money. The scheme left students with worthless qualifications and massive debts, which were eventually wiped by the Morrison government in 2019. The central statement of the ideology driving public policy in this area is the Productivity Commission's 2016 report on competition in human services. The report presented market competition as the desired model for a wide range of human services, including social housing, services at public hospitals, specialist palliative care, public dental services, services in remote Indigenous communities and grant-based family and community services. After being presented with ample evidence of the problems of for-profit provision, the PC responded with a single, evidence-free sentence: 'The Commission considers that maximising community welfare from the provision of human services does not depend on adopting one type of model or favouring one type of service provider.' Although the PC had previously hailed competition in VET as a model of well-regulated competition, the undeniable failure of Fee-Help was now blamed on the regulator, the Australian Skills Quality Authority. But the only solution offered was more and better 'safeguards', a term which usually means Band-Aid solutions to fundamental design problems. Since then we have seen catastrophic failures in aged care, the reversal of the move to private prisons and the exclusion of acute care hospitals from so-called 'public-private partnerships'. Even the PC is backing away from the for-profit model. Its latest report on childcare noted the growing dominance of the for-profit sector and observed that a much larger proportion of for-profit providers failed to meet standards. The chair of the inquiry, Prof Deborah Brennan, provided a supplementary statement urging action to reduce the share of for-profit businesses. Brennan observed that aspects of Australia's 'highly marketized approach' to childcare will 'work against equitable, high quality provision unless moderated'. 'Accordingly, I suggest measures to strengthen and expand not for-profit provision, attention to the financial strategies of large investor-backed and private equity companies, and regulatory strategies to discourage providers whose business models and labour practices do not align well with the National Cabinet vision,' she wrote. This expert judgment was a bridge too far for the PC ideologues, who ducked the issue for the most part. An exception was the idea of a tendering scheme for 'persistent 'thin' markets', where the commission proposed to 'strongly prefer not-for-profit providers where a service is completely or substantially directly funded by government'. It was unclear why this preference did not extend to the much larger part of the sector that relies on indirect government funding through subsidies to parents. To its credit, the Albanese government has done a good deal to repair the damage done to the public Tafe system, with increased funding and fee-free places. For-profit providers are complaining about the 'complete annihilation' of the private sector, even as yet more dodgy practices are revealed. But we need more than a sector-by-sector response. Rather than repeating the cycle of for-profit booms, failures, exposés and re-regulation, it's time to admit that that the ideology of market competition has failed. For-profit corporations have no place, or at most a peripheral place, in the provision of basic human services, including health, education and childcare. 'People before profit' might seem like a simplistic slogan but it is much close to the truth than 'competition and choice'. John Quiggin is a professor at the University of Queensland's school of economics
The Guardian
12-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
US inspectors general fired by Trump sue to win jobs back
Several federal watchdogs fired by Donald Trump have filed a lawsuit against his administration to get their jobs back. In the suit filed on Wednesday, eight former inspectors general from eight government agencies including defense, veterans affairs, health and human services, state, agriculture, education, labor and the Small Business Administration, said they were seeking 'redress for their unlawful and unjustified purported termination' by Trump and their respective agency heads. The lawsuit states that just four days into his second term, Trump, 'acting through a two-sentence email sent by the director or deputy director of the office of presidential personnel, purported to remove from office (supposedly on account of 'changing priorities') nearly a score of IGs'. It also says that the fired officials were 'appointed by and/or served under presidents of both parties', including Trump during his first term. Altogether, the inspectors general who were fired were responsible for conducting and facilitating oversight of more than $5tn of appropriated funds annually and more than 3.5 million federal employees, or 80% of the federal workforce. The lawsuit alleges: 'Despite the obvious illegality of these purported terminations, the head of each affected agency – including the eight heads of plaintiffs' respective agencies–effectuated and continue to effectuate the purported removals.' It adds that the eight federal agencies removed the inspectors general from their access to their government email accounts and computer systems, government-issued phones, personal ID cards and computers. The inspectors general were also alleged to have been banned from entering the government buildings where they worked, with the lawsuit stating that 'these actions have had their intended effect of making it impossible for the IGs to perform their lawful duties'. 'Because the purported removals were illegal and hence a nullity, the actions just described constituted illegal interference with the IGs' official duties,' the lawsuit says, adding 'neither President Trump nor anyone else in his administration has claimed that the purported removals complied with the IG Act'. 'Instead, President Trump falsely claimed after the fact that such removals were 'a very common thing to do' and 'a very standard thing to do,'' the lawsuit says, alleging that Trump is 'wrong to claim these actions were 'common' or 'standard'. As part of the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are seeking a declaration that their purported removals were legal nullities and so they remain as inspectors general of their agencies unless and until the president lawfully removes them in compliance with statutory procedures. Additionally, the plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief prohibiting the defendants or anyone working in concert with them from impeding the lawful exercises of the duties of their office, the lawsuit says. Wednesday's lawsuit follows Trump's sacking of 18 inspectors general less than a month after he returned to the White House. Hannibal 'Mike' Ware, one of the plaintiffs in Wednesday's lawsuit and former inspector general for the Small Business Administration, told MSNBC last month: 'This is not about any of our individual jobs. We acknowledge that the president has the right to remove any of us that he chooses. But the protections that were baked into the act is everything, absent having to provide a real reason. We're looking at what amounts to a threat to democracy, a threat to independent oversight, and a threat to transparency in government.' Similarly, Mark Greenblatt, the former inspector general of the interior department, told CNN that the firings 'should be setting off alarm bells'. 'The whole construct of inspectors general, it's based on us being independent, that we're not beholden to a political party of any stripe, that we are there as the taxpayers' representatives to call balls and strikes without any dog in the fight. And so the question is: what will President Trump do with these positions? Is he going to nominate watchdogs or is he going to nominate lapdogs?' said Greenblatt.
