If you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer.

And when the question is about the $300bn the federal government spends on services that help create a fair society, getting the wrong answer could be very, very bad.

The treasurer, Scott Morrison, asked the Productivity Commission to “identify services within the human services sector that are best suited to the introduction of greater competition, contestability and user choice”.

And this week the PC gave its preliminary answer: “Reform could offer the greatest improvements in outcomes for people who use social housing, public hospitals, specialist palliative care, public dental services, services in remote Indigenous communities, and grant-based family and community services.”

I add the italics to the proposals for that list of very essential services because it was widely reported as a recommendation that they should be subject to more competition and privatisation, when even the PC added some very important caveats.

Change, it said, would have to be “well-designed” and “underpinned by strong government stewardship”. If it was, then it could “improve the quality of services, increase access to services, and help people have a greater say over the services they use and who provides them”.

But recent changes (I won’t use “reform” because it’s a value-positive term which pre-judges the idea we are debating) have not been well designed.

In the case of vocational education and training, for example, changes started by Labor in 2009 and expanded by the Coalition in 2012 led to rampant rorting of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds by get-rich-quick shysters who preyed on the most disadvantaged.

Employment services, which the Howard government turned into a competitive market 20 years ago, are often held up as a successful case study. But successive studies have shown this has been most successful in getting jobs for unemployed people who are pretty well placed to get jobs anyway, and least successful for the most disadvantaged job seekers, who regularly report receiving extremely poor services.

And the very process of outsourcing can denude the public service of the people and skills it needs to deliver “strong stewardship” to properly check and monitor the services which non-government bodies are now providing.

Consumer choice sounds good in theory, and might even be good in practice, if the choices are made by well-informed citizens. But almost by definition some of the people seeking these kind of services are going to have their ability to make good choices impeded by sickness, disability or poverty.

In short, there are especially good policy reasons to proceed very cautiously with this kind of change, debate it vigorously and not prejudge the outcome.

And even if the treasurer doesn’t really buy these policy caveats or calls for caution, there are political reasons to have this debate properly.

The Liberal federal director, Tony Nutt, can rage about what he called Labor’s “cold-blooded lie” over Medicare privatisation during the election campaign, but the reason the ALP was able to make such a big deal of a back-office data outsourcing plan is that decades of “competition policy” and “outsourcing” have left the public deeply sceptical about its alleged benefits and intensely mistrustful of the Coalition’s plans.

Scepticism of this process to consider more competition for human services is so sky-high various groups are setting up alternative ways to have a proper debate, even if the government doesn’t want to.

The union movement, through Public Services International, is conducting a “people’s inquiry into privatisation”, chaired by the executive director of the progressive thinktank Per Capita, David Hetherington, to “start a national conversation about the impacts of privatisation, and talk directly with communities about the services they need”. Its other members are the former Western Australian Labor politician Yvonne Henderson and Archie Law, executive director of ActionAid.

Unions are obviously interested in protecting public-sector jobs, but the “people’s inquiry” is striking a chord when it argues that the government started with the wrong question.



“The Turnbull government has directed the Productivity Commission to conduct an inquiry into how to further privatise our public services, without looking at whether handing over control of our services to corporations is in the best interests of all Australians,” it says. Submissions closed on Friday and hearings start next month.



In other places academics and non-government organisations are also actively debating the issues they think the PC won’t – or hasn’t been asked to – consider.



If it is really after better, smarter services, rather than just saving money, the Turnbull government should take a few steps back from its PC brief and get into this discussion.



Because however much the treasurer tries to skew the question, when this debate gets down to specifics, the electorate is not going to buy any “user choice” or “contestability” or “competition” in human services unless they are convinced the government is not only thinking about cheaper services but also about the humans who need them and the society they hold together.

