Barbara Preston’s recent reflection on Australia’s school funding system offers a quietly devastating insight into the paradox of public education reform._

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The Karmel and Gonski reports — widely admired by advocates of public schooling — helped entrench the very dynamics that have accelerated the state-funded private school ascendancy. Their shared principle of “sector-blind” funding ignored the deep structural asymmetries between public and private schools, and, in doing so, laid the foundations for a policy juggernaut that continues to roll over equity, effectiveness, and public purpose.

But what Preston lays bare in education is not an isolated story. Education is just one in a fleet of privatisation juggernauts reshaping Australian society. Over the past four decades, successive governments have applied the same logic — outsource, subsidise, deregulate, privatise — across housing, health, aged care, disability services, childcare and universities. What was once a country of pioneering public institutions is now a land increasingly defined by fragmented, marketised and inequitable systems, each leaving the public poorer and the private more powerful.

This trajectory is not irreversible. The juggernaut is not fate. It is design – and design can be undone. But doing so will require a decisive shift in political imagination and will, especially from Labor. It must stop managing the status quo and begin challenging the architecture of privatisation itself.

From public mission to private markets

The pattern is strikingly consistent across sectors.

Public systems are first underfunded, then declared inadequate. Private providers are invited in, first as partners, then as competitors, then as preferred alternatives. Governments shift from supplying services to subsidising demand – through vouchers, rebates and payments that flow to private operators, often with little accountability.

In housing, the result is a shortfall of public, social and affordable homes, spiralling rents, and rising homelessness. In aged care, we have witnessed catastrophic failures from for-profit providers incentivised to cut costs, not deliver care. In the NDIS, users must navigate complex markets better suited to agile providers than people with disabilities. In early childhood, corporate chains dominate, fees soar and educators are chronically underpaid. In higher education, our universities behave like commercial exporters more than civic institutions.

And in all of these, as in education, public money underwrites private advantage, while the collective infrastructure of fairness and capability is left to fray.

The cost is not just social – it’s strategic

What began as an ideological shift has become a structural vulnerability.

Australia is facing a world of growing complexity and competition: climate disruption, geopolitical realignment, population ageing and accelerating technological change. These challenges demand a society that is smart, fair, cohesive and resilient. That demands public systems with the scale and capacity to respond.

Yet our current settings take us in the opposite direction – towards fragmentation, inequality and systemic fragility. Australia is now at risk of sliding deeper into a semi-peripheral role in the global economy: rich in resources, but poor in sovereign capacity, productivity, innovation and social cohesion.

To compete and thrive in the 21st century, we need to rebuild our public foundations – starting with housing, care, education, and human capital. This cannot be done through markets alone.

Reversing the juggernaut is possible – sector by sector

Despite the scale of the challenge, the situation is far from hopeless. There are well-developed proposals across every sector that could form the backbone of a national reconstruction:

• A national public housing strategy delivering 25,000 new homes a year, lifting supply and security.

• Universal access to free public early learning and care, with professional pay and conditions.

• Rebalancing health investment by phasing out public subsidies to private health insurance and expanding public primary care.

• Ending for-profit aged care provision and guaranteeing staffing ratios, training and quality.

• Capping university fees, restoring public funding and returning mission to the heart of higher education.

• And — crucially — funding all public schools to the Schooling Resource Standard immediately, not by 2029.

None of these are moonshots. But each requires breaking with the privatisation reflex that has defined policy for decades.

Can Labor make this turn – and win?

That brings us to the political challenge.

The Labor Party is in a stronger position than at any time since the early 1980s. It governs nationally, holds office in nearly every state and territory, and, following its 2025 re-election, commands a federal caucus with a progressive majority for the first time in decades.

This moment offers Labor the chance to reorient the national agenda away from the market managerialism of the post-Hawke era and toward a renewed democratic political economy – one grounded in public capability, shared prosperity, and institutional trust.

The electorate is more ready than often assumed. Polling consistently shows support for public ownership of services like energy, aged care and housing. The NDIS, Medicare and public education retain broad, albeit uneven, public affection, even as they strain under current settings. Voters are not blind to the failures of privatised systems. They are hungry for better performance, competence, equity, and purpose.

The idea that governments can, and should, do more is still alive. The question is whether Labor will nurture that potential and grow it.

From juggernauts to justice

The privatisation juggernauts can feel unstoppable. They have powerful backers, deep roots, and compounding effects. But they are not natural phenomena. They were built — over decades — through policy and political choices.

They can be unbuilt the same way.

Australia once led the world in creating democratic public institutions: award wages, public universities, Medicare, HECS, universal schooling. We can lead again – by building a post-neoliberal Australia, grounded in thriving, care, capability and justice.

The first step is recognising the scale of the challenge. The second is making different choices.

Labor has a rare opportunity: not just to govern, but to govern differently. To stop nudging the juggernauts and start turning them around.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.