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It has been more than twenty years since the Australian Government opened case management services for the long-term unemployed to the market, laying the foundation for its now fully privatised employment services system. The system is cited as a successful model of outsourced service delivery in the Australian Government’s response to the recommendations of the Competition Policy Review to ramp up competition in the delivery of human services. Yet the employment services system’s measures of success, focused on aggregate outcomes and service delivery costs, mask the adverse impact of its marketisation on ‘hard to place’ jobseekers and on not-for-profit organisations that have traditionally championed those jobseekers (Gallet 2016). 

Dr. Helen Dickinson, Associate Professor Public Governance, Melbourne School of Government and School of Social and Political Sciences

In 1979 Amartya Sen addressed scholars and students at Stanford University, giving the coveted annual Tanner Lecture on Human Value. The title of the lecture was, Inequality of what? Here, Sen laid out the basis of his scholarly corpus which would lead to his Nobel Laureate, the Human Development Index and subsequent books and articles that which have underpinned the revival of human development.

Vocational education and training once held a proud place in Australia’s education system, providing opportunity along a less academically and more practically oriented path. While interest in and need for vocational education and training has not lost currency, the sector has been drawn into a downward reputational spiral. Reforms have been introduced in abundance to reverse the problems of VET, but instead have contributed to loss of status and scandal after scandal. At the heart of the debilitation of the VET sector has been lack of respect for and support for teaching professionalism in the reform process. Industry and government domination over what was to be taught in VET was intended to create opportunity through growth and jobs, but domination is bound to be doomed when the guardians of delivery and quality are not engaged professionally in the process. In these circumstances, a market methodology is likely to attract markets in ‘bads’ that repeatedly dislodge markets in ‘goods’. Regulation also faces a difficult challenge when it is overlayed on a market where there is deep and persistent internal conflict over the values of the sector. Delivery of quality education and training is much touted, but a schism sits below this mantra. The sector divides in its commitment to professional educators and to the aspiration of being a quality education provider in a highly stratified tertiary sector. 

Manipulation and deception are predictable, yet strangely under acknowledged, features of competitive markets. In their award-winning book Phishing for Phools, economics professors George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller argue that trickery on the part of sellers is not just an occasional nuisance: it's an inherent part of our economic system, a natural consequence of competitive pressure. The upshot is that ' free markets leads us to buy, and to pay too much for, products that we do not need'. This downside of markets is worth pondering as we consider marketizing human services in Australia.

David Tennant provides a service provider perspective on the Social Service Futures dialogue;