In part, this may be a response to the incapacity of the press pack to focus on anything much else other than the narrative, or “distractions”, demonstrated in spades on Saturday.

In Perth, Julia Gillard has just announced further education policy initiatives at Challis Primary School – principally, the expansion of NAPLAN testing to an online diagnostic tool for teachers and students, clearer pathways for trades training, the introduction of an Australian Baccalaureate for high-achieving secondary students, and financial rewards for both improved schools and teachers ($75-100 000 for primary and secondary schools, and $8 000 a year for teachers, to be introduced from 2013 when the budget returns to surplus).

Gillard took questions not from the travelling media, but from teachers, early childhood educators and children and parents.

The quality of the interchange was impressive, but ABC News 24 interrupted its coverage, which it wouldn’t have been doing had the question period been full of the usual journo stuff about polls.

Meanwhile, yesterday at Carindale shopping centre in the Brisbane marginal seat of Bonner, accompanied by local MP Kerry Rea, Kevin Rudd took a similar tack, highlighting the concrete benefits of the BER to local businesses and schools, something Labor candidates are doing all round the country. Gillard’s visits to regional Queensland centres have also been preceded by local announcements, ensuring favourable headlines and front pages in local print media, and coverage on local tv news. Labor’s communications and marginal seat strategy, then, has been reframed to short-circuit the circus while the Coalition continues to play a risk averse strategy.

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.