I agree with this article wholeheartedly. A negative aspect of the neoloberal economic views is "user pays". The profit motive at all cost and continued growth is also a problem.
My wife teaches at a Christian independent school in NSW. It is one of currently 13 schools run corporately by a Christian organisation. Its a good environment for her to teach in. The school is in the middle of a new dormitory suburb being developed. There are no new government schools built yet in the surrounding developments. So independent schools are springing up and existing ones are growing. In two years the school my wife is at, kindy grew from 2 to 4 classes of 20 kids or so. Another interesting point is tgat a significant majority of the children are From Hindu or Muslim families. The school just requires basic compliance to religious values.
TAFE is a classic example. The previous LNP government starved TAFE while subsidising arrange of dodgy private providers who offered inferior training. The result was a huge shortage in competent tradies, which still hasn't been fixed. We now have to rush to train enough people to do the necessary work. This is a major reason why we are building about 100,000 LESS homes a year than we need to meet demand. Ignore the LNP trying to blame immigration for the housing shortage. The real reason for the housing shortage is the lack of tradies caused by the LNP slashing funding for TAFE.
I'm 68 and retired four years ago after working in the Australian Public Service for 35 years. While I was less than entirely impressed by the APS overall, almost every professional contact I had with the private sector indicated that they were as bad or worse, albeit sometimes in different ways.
Just as a small illustrative example, back in the mid 1980s I was working for the Department of Defence and was silly enough to get elected to the council of a professional institute. Most colleagues on the council were from the private sector - including one with BHP and one with Coles Myer. A couple of times, over a quiet beer after a council meeting, we swapped bureaucracy and inefficiency stories. While I had some pretty good ones, they were both easily able to one-up me every time.
So even the much vaunted greater efficiency of the private sector - really the sole argument for privatisation that made some sense in theory - turned out to be almost entirely illusory. And, once you factor in the need to make a profit, you almost invariably find that privatisation does indeed deliver less for more, as you say.
I've seen this professionally in areas ranging from vocational training through employment services and office accommodation to electricity supply. In all these instances, privatisation was an abject failure.
Of course all this assumes it was actually intended to deliver better services. Once you recognise that it always was a cynical and corrupt enterprise to deliver unearned profits to mates and donors, you start to understand why it has endured so long (and well past the point of it being proven to be a disaster for those needing the services): it is, in fact, working EXACTLY and very effectively as its architects intended.
Couldn’t agree more and congratulations on putting down all my impressions from a career of five decades in public education, so sussinctly. As usual we find mention of The Rodent in your article…Howard was the worst PM ever imo, although recent efforts by the LNP have seriously thrown some shade on him.
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, neo-liberalism is the only ideology that, when it fails, people recommend more of the thing that failed to make up for its failure. If any other ideology failed even a fraction of how much neo-liberalism has, it would have been abandoned long ago.
I wonder how financially viable many large corporations in all areas would be were there no subsidies provided by us taxpayers. Very few if any I guess.
Could you point to a period when aged care and health were not primarily delived through the private sector? It is not a question of returning to public delivery because it never was public. The main element of public health is and was the public hospitals. Which is where most of the serious medicine still happens. But equally the GP and medical specialists have always been private for fee or for contract, few on the government payroll.
Aged care: the Hawke government, so attacked here, was the one that took on a decrepid largely private system of nursing homes (about 40% for profit; 40% non profit church run; and 20% large awful run down state facilities) and aged people’s hostels (non profit church run) to put a halt to the growth of the former, rapidly expand the latter and created a sense of standards driven by resident outcomes. The organisations may now run larger sets of facilities but the basis organisational approach is the same.
Sure the Howard years gave more power to the owners and eased back on the assessment of outcomes. But it has never been a government delivered system - what the ‘neo liberalism’ did was fund by need, and trightly constrain that you will be in residential care until clearly you need it. Average care needs were much higher by 1996 than they were in 1983.
So what do I conclude from that - the author knows nothing of the history of community and health services if it thinks these were once government provided.
I agree with this article wholeheartedly. A negative aspect of the neoloberal economic views is "user pays". The profit motive at all cost and continued growth is also a problem.
My wife teaches at a Christian independent school in NSW. It is one of currently 13 schools run corporately by a Christian organisation. Its a good environment for her to teach in. The school is in the middle of a new dormitory suburb being developed. There are no new government schools built yet in the surrounding developments. So independent schools are springing up and existing ones are growing. In two years the school my wife is at, kindy grew from 2 to 4 classes of 20 kids or so. Another interesting point is tgat a significant majority of the children are From Hindu or Muslim families. The school just requires basic compliance to religious values.
Government is failing in the provision of education https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/schools/latest-release
Holding left of centre views I think that other public goods are good candidates for public ownership. Eg
- toll roads - NSW provids a limited rebate for some heavy users.
- electricity - will keep consumer costs down by removing the profit motive.
- gas - national wealth fund.
- medical - everywhere.
TAFE is a classic example. The previous LNP government starved TAFE while subsidising arrange of dodgy private providers who offered inferior training. The result was a huge shortage in competent tradies, which still hasn't been fixed. We now have to rush to train enough people to do the necessary work. This is a major reason why we are building about 100,000 LESS homes a year than we need to meet demand. Ignore the LNP trying to blame immigration for the housing shortage. The real reason for the housing shortage is the lack of tradies caused by the LNP slashing funding for TAFE.
Just wish more people had realised and written this 40 years ago
I'm 68 and retired four years ago after working in the Australian Public Service for 35 years. While I was less than entirely impressed by the APS overall, almost every professional contact I had with the private sector indicated that they were as bad or worse, albeit sometimes in different ways.
Just as a small illustrative example, back in the mid 1980s I was working for the Department of Defence and was silly enough to get elected to the council of a professional institute. Most colleagues on the council were from the private sector - including one with BHP and one with Coles Myer. A couple of times, over a quiet beer after a council meeting, we swapped bureaucracy and inefficiency stories. While I had some pretty good ones, they were both easily able to one-up me every time.
So even the much vaunted greater efficiency of the private sector - really the sole argument for privatisation that made some sense in theory - turned out to be almost entirely illusory. And, once you factor in the need to make a profit, you almost invariably find that privatisation does indeed deliver less for more, as you say.
I've seen this professionally in areas ranging from vocational training through employment services and office accommodation to electricity supply. In all these instances, privatisation was an abject failure.
Of course all this assumes it was actually intended to deliver better services. Once you recognise that it always was a cynical and corrupt enterprise to deliver unearned profits to mates and donors, you start to understand why it has endured so long (and well past the point of it being proven to be a disaster for those needing the services): it is, in fact, working EXACTLY and very effectively as its architects intended.
Couldn’t agree more and congratulations on putting down all my impressions from a career of five decades in public education, so sussinctly. As usual we find mention of The Rodent in your article…Howard was the worst PM ever imo, although recent efforts by the LNP have seriously thrown some shade on him.
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, neo-liberalism is the only ideology that, when it fails, people recommend more of the thing that failed to make up for its failure. If any other ideology failed even a fraction of how much neo-liberalism has, it would have been abandoned long ago.
I wonder how financially viable many large corporations in all areas would be were there no subsidies provided by us taxpayers. Very few if any I guess.
Part of the great lie is that good business doesn’t need government. But listen to them howl at the merest hint of cuts.
aged care and health?
Could you point to a period when aged care and health were not primarily delived through the private sector? It is not a question of returning to public delivery because it never was public. The main element of public health is and was the public hospitals. Which is where most of the serious medicine still happens. But equally the GP and medical specialists have always been private for fee or for contract, few on the government payroll.
Aged care: the Hawke government, so attacked here, was the one that took on a decrepid largely private system of nursing homes (about 40% for profit; 40% non profit church run; and 20% large awful run down state facilities) and aged people’s hostels (non profit church run) to put a halt to the growth of the former, rapidly expand the latter and created a sense of standards driven by resident outcomes. The organisations may now run larger sets of facilities but the basis organisational approach is the same.
Sure the Howard years gave more power to the owners and eased back on the assessment of outcomes. But it has never been a government delivered system - what the ‘neo liberalism’ did was fund by need, and trightly constrain that you will be in residential care until clearly you need it. Average care needs were much higher by 1996 than they were in 1983.
So what do I conclude from that - the author knows nothing of the history of community and health services if it thinks these were once government provided.