It was the idea of making money from looking after children that so many people found objectionable, and the fact that they had no choice but to participate due to the lack of child care choice in their area. It was almost like WorkChoices for the under-fives. And there was the suspicion that ABC Learning cut corners and offered lower quality care — a view reinforced when it tried to stop the Victorian Government from inspecting its centres and argued its directors weren’t legally responsible for the children in the company’s care, when figures emerged of the company driving down the wages and working conditions of its staff, and when stories emerged of poor quality care.

That’s all now linked to the Coalition. Not just because of the subsidies model that massively expanded under John Howard, but because of the company’s willingness to embrace the Coalition, with Sallyanne Atkinson as chair and Larry Anthony on the board. ABC Learning has now become emblematic of the Howard Government’s approach to childcare, and Eddie Groves will come to be identified with the era just as surely as Alan Bond and Christopher Skase represented the Hawke years.

For those of us in Brisbane who remember Sallyanne Atkinson as both Liberal Lord Mayor and perenially unsuccessful federal candidate, her protestations about her own financial position and avoidance of responsibility repeatedly made in the Courier-Mail have been an all too familiar, and quite predictable tale. Particularly damaging, and revealing, are her comments expressing puzzlement about how ABC could lose money – being a “government supported business”. Keane is quite correct to say that the sorry tale of ABC Learning will redound on the Coalition. But I also think he doesn’t quite understand the paradigm shift in public thinking he himself describes – and I note that bloggers and commenters here at LP were questioning the validity of the market childcare model a long time ago – when he writes:

Whenever the Coalition now talks about private-sector child care — an eminently reasonable concept, given sufficiently rigorous accreditation requirements — people will recall ABC Learning and a profit-obsessed approach to looking after their kids. This is slow-burn stuff, the type of political background radiation that doesn’t show up in polls but slowly accretes over time, shaping voters’ perceptions of parties, making them resistant to their messages, or in their opponents’ case, more receptive. But it’s not yet clear that the Coalition realises how much baggage it is carrying in the debate.

I’m not sure that private-sector child care is an “eminently reasonable concept” at all. Not only – as Atkinson admits – was its business model based on what is basically rent seeking – a transfer of public funds to private profit, but whatever accounting and managerial errors were made, ABC demonstrated that the only way you could make a profit was through aggressive acquisitions in search of market dominance and local monopolies and cutting costs. It seems very clear to me that the market logic is precisely the problem, and Keane is right to point to the fact that people are questioning it, without accepting that the question about the desirability of profiting from child care is absolutely valid.

I think we’re going to see a return to child care as a matter of non-profit and voluntary association provision, with more of an educational and development focus, which I think is fantastic. But I also think we’re going to see a return to the legitimacy of state and community sector provision more broadly, as the lessons of “letting the market rip” are drawn. It would appear that some commentators can’t see those lessons even when they’re staring them in the face.