The collapse of ABC Learning has prompted widespread calls for greatly increased regulation of childcare services. According to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, child care needs to be a "highly managed market", not only with regulation of service standards but also with caps on the number of places. Equally, the organisation representing independent private childcare operators, Childcare Associations Australia, has called on the Government not to allow "another childcare monopoly" to take ABC Learning's place. Central planning is in the air. To view the article click read more.
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[ ABC of better childcare ]
Is it Wayne the bold or Swan the Unready?
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SPEAKING in Brisbane last week, Wayne Swan said that "as Treasurer, I'm effectively minister for markets". His job, he explained, involved more than merely promoting the benefits that markets could bring. Rather, it required taking the lead in "designing markets that can serve the public without blunting the incentives that enable them to allocate resources effectively and generate prosperity". But these needed to be "the right type of markets", which were not "those that reward greed". To that end, they needed to be "creatively constructed and informed by evidence".
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[ Is it Wayne the bold or Swan the Unready? ]
While there are at least seven full facility-based broadband competitors, competitive facility-based fixed line investments appear to be declining in favour of use of Telstra’s network. It also appears that no carrier is presently willing to make significant fixed broadband investments without substantial regulatory commitments and protections relative to those currently available.
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[ An Optimal Policy Framework for a New Broadband Network ]
The word from Canberra was that the public sector can never be big enough, writes Henry Ergas.
THE 2020 Summit proposals form a very mixed bag. Some seem fanciful, and will doubtless be dispatched by the bureaucrats to that great resting place in the sky of ideas better forgotten. With others, tortured drafting, presumably reflecting the triumph of compromise over clarity of thought and expression, make it difficult to understand what, if anything, was intended. Yet others, such as the republic, a bill of rights and some form of treaty, have a degree of corrugated charm, recalling the old saw that there were plenty of good and new ideas, but the good ideas had little that was new, while the new ideas were far from good.
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[ Summits verdict is bigger government ]
Kevin Rudd's education and health reforms will founder if they focus only on improved central-planning initiatives without allowing users to vote with their feet, advises Henry Ergas.
IF there is one law of economics, it is that if you reward people to do more of something, they will. Assuming that is what you want, so far, so good. But there is a less pleasant corollary, which is this: if they do more of what you are rewarding them for, they will do less of those activities for which they are not rewarded or are rewarded less, with results that can eliminate the benefits you were seeking.
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[ PM reforms could hit target and miss point ]
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