Child care

From the ABC's summary:

The Albanese government's Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee released its second report recently. […]

The committee made 22 recommendations to the federal government on ways to best improve economic inclusion and create a more equal and prosperous nation.

It said its recommendations had been made with regard to their fiscal impact, their effect on workforce participation, and the long-term sustainability of the social security system.

But the committee said its five priority recommendations were to:

• "Substantially increase JobSeeker" and related working-age payments, and immediately improve the indexation arrangements of the payments.
• Increase the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance to better reflect the high rents actually charged in the private rental market.
• Commit to a "full-scale redesign" of Australia's employment services system to underpin the government's goal of full employment, and to replace the current system, which "worsens economic exclusion" with one that "promotes economic inclusion".
• Implement a national early childhood development system that is available to every child, beginning with abolishing the activity test for the child care subsidy to guarantee access to a minimum three days of high-quality care.
• Renew the culture and practice of Australia's social security system to support economic inclusion and wellbeing.

The committee's experts said that last point was really important.

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head.  At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs.  From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage. Artificial scarcity also creates growth dependencies: because survival is mediated by prices and wages, when productivity improvements and recessions lead to unemployment people suffer loss of access to essential goods — even when the output of those goods is not affected — and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis.

There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.