Excerpts
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The latest revelations from the ABC's Adele Ferguson and her team about the sexual abuse of children inside Australia's childcare centres are horrific.
It's chilling to hear police and criminologists warn that Australians have no idea about the scale of the infiltration that paedophile networks have made into our $22 billion childcare industry.
In 2009, when Professor Brennan and her colleagues talked about the "vast national experiment" Australia was running on its children, they were talking about the radical shift towards privatised and corporatised childcare that had occurred in Australia since the early 1990s.
But we're still living with the fallout from decisions taken decades ago.
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Let the market decide
During those debates in 2009, Australia was still dealing with the rapid rise, and then sudden collapse, of ABC Learning Centres.
ABC Learning was symbolic of "modern" Australian childcare.
It listed on the stock exchange in 2001 and five years later it had a market capitalisation of $2.6 billion. It had adapted its business model to accommodate the Howard government's generous Child Care Benefit and pursued an aggressive campaign of expansion.
It became the largest publicly traded childcare provider in the world.
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The mess left for today's children and Millennial and gen Z parents
That was 16 years ago.
But if you read the transcript of the parliamentary inquiry that was established after ABC Learning's collapse in 2008, you'll see multiple experts raising concerns about where they could see Australian policy heading.
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How does that sound to today's parents?
The parents whose children are in child care today are overwhelmingly from the millennial (29 to 44 years old) and gen Z (13 to 28 years old) cohorts.
They're living in a world in which, because child care and early childhood education wasn't taken seriously by politicians in the past, but the structure of the modern economy practically demands that all parents work today, they're having to navigate a system plagued by shocking problems.
They're also having to read articles that share advice on how to keep their children safe from paedophiles while they're at work.
It's another legacy from the so-called "golden era" of economic reform that has been left for younger Australians to deal with.
In March this year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese dismissed calls for a royal commission into the childcare sector.
But with the latest revelations from the ABC's investigative team, those calls have returned.