Description: Australia has become a case study in how not to run child-care services, writes Deborah Brennan. How did this happen and what should we do about it? In this article Deborah Brennan explores how the governments and policy developments in Australia allowed market forces, and ABC Learning, to dominate the child care sector. She discusses what can be learned form the rise and demise of ABC Learning. As a result of the experience in Australia she writes: “there is a great opportunity to bring the skills and talents of the non-profit sector back into child-care policymaking. The headlong rush to the market and to private profits that has characterised this sector since the early 1990s has marginalised community-based child care. This short-sighted approach needs to end.”