The monumental collapse of the ABC Learning empire — much like the economy that incubated its malignant growth — should not be seen as a total calamity, despite the obvious potential for fallout.
Regardless of the Federal Government’s bailout package, the debacle is only beginning to reverberate through our community. The revelation that almost 400 ABC Learning centres may close clearly brings dire consequences for staff, parents and 30,000 children at ABC. Not to mention shareholders.
Receivers McGrathNicol have looked at the figures and decided that more than one in three of ABC's profligate centres aren't sustainable, despite the essential nature of childcare in today's economy. The effect this will have is palpable. The first news of ABC's woes brought a rush on community-based childcare, while this latest announcement's timing is drawing an impassioned response from parents and the media.
Beyond further government lifelines or a rival's takeover of these centres, what hope is there for families and workers in places as disparate as Central Sydney and Innisfail?
ABC staff and parents, as much as governments and administrators, would do well to look at a phenomenon that emerged in the wake of the Argentine economic collapse in 2001. After the dust settled on el saqueo — the collective term for the devaluation of the Argentine peso, the run on the banks and the rioting, looting and death that followed — workers' collectives organised to run their enterprises autonomously.
The bosses had jumped ship. They left their workers unemployed and, in most cases, with workplaces where the assets had been stripped, sold or even smashed. But intrepid Argentines began the arduous task of getting their jobs back by recuperating the spaces left fallow by their absentee owners.
The illusion that executives and industrialists held some ethereal knowledge of business beyond the average workers' grasp quickly evaporated. Self-interest meant the workers ran the business better than the bosses who, much like ABC's Groves, had been reluctant to shoulder responsibility at the time of the crisis.
Perversely, as the cooperatives proved viable and the economy turned around, these same employers came out of the woodwork and began their fight to reclaim the businesses themselves. They had varying degrees of success thanks to the Argentine government's de facto endorsement of the takeovers, in the form of the Ley Nacional de Expropiación or National Law of Expropriation.
There is a considerable difference between post-crisis Argentina and still-wealthy suburban Australia teetering on