Price Controls On Childcare But Deadly Silence On Rents

The ACCC has recommended price controls on what child care providers can charge parents following their latest inquiry. Interestingly, price controls are fine and good here but anathema in regard to landlords and the rental crisis in Australia. This is despite the fact that many Australians are drowning in debt due to huge rental increases on their rented homes. Nothing is allowed to touch the sacrosanct property market down under it seems. In the land of runaway inflation in the residential property sector (382% over the last 30 years), of which nobody ever talks about, it is okay to fleece struggling Australians for rent to the tune of much of their weekly pay packet. Unaffordable housing is par for the course in Oz, where the dream of home ownership is a nightmare for many. Price controls on childcare but deadly silence on rents.

“The ACCC recommends further consideration of supply-side subsidies and direct price controls to limit the impact on the taxpayer, as the report finds any significant changes to policy settings in the childcare sector could reduce the impact of the hourly rate cap on fees and may warrant a shift to direct price controls alongside direct operating grants. “

• (https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/review-of-childcare-policy-to-better-meet-the-needs-of-families#:~:text=The%20ACCC%20recommends%20further%20consideration,shift%20to%20direct%20price%20controls)

Childcare Prices Can Be Capped According to ACCC

The free market has roamed far and wide during the last couple of decades of neoliberal fizz in government circles. This is why we now have a housing crisis with unaffordable rents for a third of Australians. Governments stopped building social housing because the market was supposed to take care of everything. We were all assured of this time and again, whilst simultaneously being promised cheaper bills following the privatization of utilities. None of these things have emerged. The rich have got much richer and we have been shafted. The heavily subsidised child care sector can be price controlled because the government pays for it. We may as well have nationalised childcare and be done with it.

Governments are having to step in to build lots of social housing but this will take years and in the meantime we are all being fleeced by the market. Shortages of supply in economics mean higher prices.

“Rents across Australia have risen at the fastest rate in at least 15 years, according to Corelogic’s Rental Value index. Annual rent increases, which are calculated monthly, topped 10% in late 2022 and early 2023. The last time rents increased at such a pace was in 2007 during the global financial crisis, when peak annual rent growth reached 9.7%. But the proportion of household income spent on housing is currently much higher than in 2007. The CPI rent index in March 2021 – when the current wave of rental increases began – was 55% higher than it was in June 2005, the equivalent point before the 2008 peak.”

• (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/01/australia-rental-price-rice-crisis-data)

No Price Controls On Rents, Energy, & Inflationary Food Costs

Struggling families are paying through the nose for life’s basics – accommodation, energy, and food. Housing, heating, and something to eat – it does not get any more basic than that. Corporate Australia has been making record profits on the back of increasing prices on goods and services. Australian households are doing it tough, whilst banks make a motza.

Neoliberal Governments Have Abdicated Responsibility

Corporate Australia walks on water, as do wealthy property owners in Australia. The great divide between the haves and the have nots is fast becoming a chasm of enormous proportions down under. Governments look after the interests of the wealthy and powerful, whilst the rest of us can go and sing Waltzing Matilda. Dumb Australians focus on sporting contests and keep the drinks flowing to dull the pain. How can we have a country that is too expensive to live in and not say that successive governments have failed the majority of its citizens? Capping child care charges may be a good thing but it is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the unaffordability of modern Australia.

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.

©HouseTherapy