As I pen my first post of 2017, it strikes me how little our political ‘betters’ have learned from the failures of 2016… or ’15… or the fall of the Roman Empire if you feel like going that far back. Maybe we’ve learned nothing since the Garden of Eden…

But to the matter at hand: Childcare is expensive! Indeed, the cost can be crippling for a single parent or families with two working parents. But a decade of active intervention and ‘help’ by politicians to ‘fix the childcare system’ has taken us from childcare being expensive and somewhat scarce, to being almost impossible to find, and an absolute ripoff.

The problem (as always) is regulators trying to help us.

Senator David Leyonhjelm lays it all out nicely in this post.

The main reason for this is the increased credentialism and regulation that pervades the sector. Whereas childcare workers were once just sensible, caring people, most with children or grandchildren of their own, these days they are expected to hold post-school – and sometimes even university-level – qualifications. There has also been a ratcheting up of regulation of the physical environment in childcare centres, the programs and routines offered, plus staff ratios.

Not to mention the active discouragement of using community or extended family arrangements. Want to put your child with a next-door-neighbor who also looks after her grandkids that day of the week? Forget it, there’s a hundred expensive modifications your neighbor would have to do to her home, a few tafe courses, hundreds of pages of lesson plans and emergency plans, insurance, and the list goes on.

Heaven forbid that average parent be permitted to decide who is (or is not) fit to look after their children! They may be able to vote, drive, drink, and make babies, but they better not select a non-approved person to look after their kid for a few hours… oh no, that’s well above their pay-grade.

Somehow according to these regulators the very same home that is fit for a child to grow up in, is inadequate in a thousand ways the moment you wish to look after someone else’s child. The adult who is raising three children of his or her own is suddenly unfit to oversee the welfare of someone else’s child for a few hours a few days per week.

The justifications vary: “It’s because it’s a business.” or “It’s not childcare, it’s early education.” or “But pedophiles!”

Shut up. Just shut up, all of you.

Just because money changes hands doesn’t suddenly make average adults incapable of taking care of it on their own. And ALL of life is education, structured or not… I say that as someone who spent less than 4 years of my life in school. That’s right, 4 years in total. I left when I was 8 and never looked back, and never once has it held me back. And pedophiles, child abusers, and creeps of every description are everywhere, including in the childcare centers and schools that these paranoid control freaks tell us we should trust. I’d trust a mother’s judgement with her neighbor than a ‘Working With Children Check’ on a stranger at the local childcare centre.

The best thing the government could do to help us, is to stop ‘helping’ us. Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Regulators of every kind imagine themselves to be uniquely qualified to manage other peoples lives, and imagine the masses to be incapable of basic functions if not micro managed by them. In truth, the opposite is true. The masses would carry on just fine, perhaps better, without the regulators, it is the regulators who would struggle to survive if they had to do a real job, or bring real value to others with their time.

Next time you hear people complain about childcare, use the opportunity to shine the spotlight where it belongs: On the Regulators. If politicians and bureaucrats aren’t going to learn from history, then we’ll have to do the learning, and the teaching, for them.

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