See text below.
EXCERPTS
Re: "Union move on profit daycare," Peter Shawn Taylor, Oct. 25
Mr. Taylor's piece on Australian child care enthusiastically misrepresents many facts. Here are but three:
- Australian child care was never controlled by "central planners" nor public. Once, it was primarily community-based, just like Canada's.
- Second, his assertion that the Australian child-care experience "proves (once again) that the private sector is more efficient and effective than the public" is challenged by numerous articles in the Australian press documenting escalating fees, low staff wages, severe space shortages, serious quality concerns, legal challenges of small centres by big operators, ex-ministers on corporate child-care boards -- oh yes, and very, very big profits.
- And third, the evidence shows that "putting parents in control of a voucher" has nothing to do with providing them with choices. Indeed, an important lesson for Canada is that the main winners in Australian child care are not parents, children or taxpayers but the owners of the publicly funded for-profit child-care corporations that are making out like bandits.
- reprinted from the National Post