Soaring childcare prices in Australia

Interesting article regarding increasing childcare prices in Australia:

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/06/22/rocketing-childcare-fees-sees-parents-lose-60-salary

In my opinion, the explanation by principal researcher of rising prices is not all valid.

I agree with lack of supply though. This is due to following reasons:

Too much regulation and red-tape before a childcare facility can start operating. This is reasonable, because not everybody should be allowed to open a childcare facility.

High wages that childcare centres have to pay to a high number of employees. It's not high salary that each childcare worker receives - in reality it's indeed opposite. There is a requirement that children per teacher ratio should be 4 or 5. Therefore many teachers are required.

High rent.

I accept the items 1 & 2, because it's is valid to keep the regulations high and keep proper basic childcare at a good level of compliance.

However "high standards" is something you can't say about childcare in general. Therefore it's not a price raising factor.
The demand is much higher than supply. Also majority of parents don't have a choice and are forced to enroll their children to the only childcare centre even if they are not satisfied with the quality. I mean there is no economic reasons for childcare providers to care about quality.
It's natural to expect higher quality for higher rates, but it's not realistic.

Another problem is that current situation makes childcare for working families a luxury. Therefore it pushes socializing and early for majority of working people children almost impossible.

In my opinion education, housing and medical services should not be regulated by the free market rules as it happens at the moment.

Comments

Wine - 2011 Brown Brothers Crouchen Riesling

Very nice wine with fruity taste - peach and pear: Consumed with Hungarian salami. Tasting notes .

Scrum - Team Culture and Wall Manifesto

In the Scrum framework one of the key components is the wall and daily stand-up. In some organisations I worked with the whole concept of the wall is not accepted by many developers, because of the stand-up necessity and "time waste". Very often all that methodology is used for the sake of methodology and not to achieve what we actually do - adding or creating value to our customer (usually called "The Business"). I can understand frustration that is caused by the wall and stand-up process. From the software developer perspective it is really a waste of time for the following reasons: 1. In 95% of cases developers are head down working like hell delivering valuable outcomes that they are accountable for. Extra effort to go to the wall, staying there for 15-30 minutes and listening or not listening to what others were doing yesterday and will be doing tomorrow is annoying for them; 2. The mere fact of having to do something mandatory to do that looks like...

Mastering The Multitasking

There is usually two distinct perspectives on multi-tasking: 1. Multitasking is counterproductive. We get distracted by multiple tasks that all get our way and fight for our scarce attention, time and resources. This leads to a common fallacy that if you do multiple activities “at a time” you are not doing good work in any of those. 2. Multitasking is a way of getting many things done in a short period of time or in a long run. Indeed it can be either a disaster or a great helper depending on how it is used and practiced. Most recent research shows that we don’t do multiple tasks purely in parallel or simultaneously. That means we don’t purely multi-task, but switch between tasks and execute them one at a time, but by spending very small timeframes on each task. A good example from the history is a story about Julius Caesar capabilities in that area. Plutarch writes, “Caesar disciplined himself so far as to be able to dictate letters from on horseback, and to give directi...

Travels etc.

Search This Blog