text: The report is wide-ranging and covers topics from government procurement to anti-competitive conduct and parallel imports. Perhaps most concerning is its recommendations regarding “human services”.
  This sounds good until one realises what this means - a fully marketised system of education, health care, child care, aged care and many other social services.
  The problem here is equity. The review does not view access to high-quality public services as a right of citizenship. Rather, it wants to ration social services through the market, where access is determined by an individual’s ability to pay.
  Of course, in the utopian vision of the review panel, marketising social services will force private providers to reflect consumer preferences better than government can. Yet markets depend upon inequality.
  The reality of marketised service provision is that high-income earners enjoy the luxury of being able to pay for high-quality services. However, the majority of people must make do with lower-quality and cheaper or free services.
  There are also other costs associated with moving government services to the private sector. For example, choosing the appropriate provider involves significant search costs.
  Australian parents know how hard it can be to find a place for their child in the child-care market. AAP/Lukas Coch
  This is especially so in the area of child care where many parents are struggling to find places for their children. The privatisation of this service has also meant that many parents are forced to use centres that have vacancies rather than those closer to home.
  Asymmetric information is another problem. For example, in the now-marketised electricity sector, it’s in the interest of the big corporations to make it very difficult for consumers to accurately compare the price of electricity between different companies.