My latest in The Guardian 

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”.

Back in 2022, after my first encounter with ChatGPT, I suggested that it was likely to wipe out large categories of “bullshit jobs”, but unlikely to create mass unemployment. In retrospect, that was probably an overestimate of the likely impact. But three years later, it seems as if an update might be appropriate.

Source: Wikipedia

In the last three years, I have found a few uses for LLM technology. First, I use a product called Rewind, which transcribes the content of Zoom meetings and produces a summary (you may want to check local law on this). Also, I have replaced Google with Kagi, a search engine which will, if presented with a question, produced a detailed answer with links to references, most of which are similar to those I would have found on an extensive Google search, avoiding ads and promotions. Except in the sense that anything on the Internet may be wrong, the results aren’t subject to the hallucinations for which ChatGPT is infamous.

Put high-quality search and accurate summarization together and you have the technology for a literature survey. And that’s what OpenAI now offers as DeepResearch I’ve tried it a few times, and it’s as good as I would expect from a competent research assistant or a standard consultant’s report. If I were asked to do a report on a topic with which I had limited familiarity, I would certainly check out what DeepResearch had to say.

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Anzac Day again, and war still ravages the world. Someday, peace will come.

Having finished off the Easter eggs (or bunnies/bilbies) and Hot Cross Buns (though these are a year-round thing now), I ought to be turning attention back to what’s happening in the world. But that’s too depressing to look at, a view our aspiring leaders have endorsed by resolutely ignoring anything more geopolitical than the price of petrol.

So, I’m going to turn my attention to the various absurdities created by having a four-day holiday that floats all over the calendar, from March 22 to April 25, depending on arcane calculations about the full moon. These in turn can be traced to the calendar used by one subgroup of a religion now practised by only a small minority of the population (according to this survey, only 17 per cent of Australians attended an Easter services in the three years to 2023)

Easter is late this year, meaning that we have only three days between Easter Monday (a holiday of no religious significance whatsoever) and Anzac Day, (a date genuinely held as sacred by many Australians). The gap is long enough that most of us will have to go back to work, but leaves a long interval in February and March with no holidays at all in most states.

The fluctuating date of Easter makes a mess of school calendars, in particular making it difficult for Christmas holidays as well.

As it happens, the UK has a law on its books, passed in 1928 but never brought into effect, setting Easter as the first Sunday after the first Saturday in April. It would be a great idea to adopt this timing. A further improvement would be to shift Australia Day to 3 March, the anniversary of the Australia Act which established our independence from the UK once and for all.

Back in November, when I concluded that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli lots of readers thought I was going over the top. In retrospect, and with one exception, I was hopelessly over-optimistic. I imagined a trajectory similar to Orban’s Hungary, with a gradual squeeze on political opposition and civil society, playing out over years and multiple terms in office,.

The reality has been massively worse, both in terms of speed and scope. Threats of conquest against friendly countries, masked thugs abducting people from the street, shakedowns of property from enemies of the state, concentration camps outside the reach of the legal system, all happening at a pace more comparable to Germany in 1933 than to the examples I had in mind.

The one exception is that I expected Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day 1. Instead, perhaps to preserve a veneer of legality, he has commissioned a report from the Secretary of Defense (Hegseth) and the Secretary of Homeland Security (Noem), due by 20 April. Unless he faces massive political blowback in the next few days, he will doubtless order these flunkies to recommend invoking the Act, effectively the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act.

Meanwhile, two other crucial issues are coming to a head. First, Trump is openly defying the courts over the illegal deportation and imprisonment in a concentration camp of legal migrant Abrego Garcia and others and is now threatening the same even for native-born US citizens. Second, elements of civil society (notably universities and law firms) that have previously engaged in shameful capitulation are now standing up.

If Trump is defeated on all three fronts, there is a good chance that US democracy could survive his onslaughts, though it will take many years to recover. But a Trump victory on even one of them will spell the end. Defeating the courts would render any legal constraints on his power irrelevant. The Insurrection Act would permit him to use troops to suppress protest and to arrest his political opponents. A victory over civil society would turn the US into a totalitarian state, in which all organisations are controled by the Leader and his followers.

I haven’t given up hope, but I don’t expect that Trump will be stopped. The vast majority of Republican voters support everything Trump is doing, even though he has signally failed to deliver on the economic prosperity he promised. And while it would only take a handful of Republicans in Congress to change sides and stop him, there is no sign that this will happen.

Once Trump’s dictatorship is established there is no way back within the current US system. When his regime finally collapses the models for reform will be those of post-war reconstruction of a defeated and discredited state, a process which is sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always painful