Bonnie Castillo, executive director of National Nurses United, says America Is Not for Sale. “It's up to us to defend the Veterans Administration, United States Postal Service and more from being sold off to the highest bidder.”

Members of the Public Service Association have gone out on a week-long strike to protest “a decade of erosion of their pay rates,” says Kerry Davies, PSA national secretary. The Nurse Maude Care Coordination in Porirua and the Hutt Valley, where they work, is managed by a nonprofit, “The situation for administrators is so dire that many of them are on pay levels below the Living Wage. Their colleagues are standing together to fight for the recognition and pay they deserve,” says Davies.

The formation of another Royal Commission to look into introducing private competition into aged care and is just “kicking a political hot potato into the long grass” and flies in the face of past experience, says the Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor. “But we do know that childcare was thrown into crisis when one private provider, ABC Learning, which had been allowed to acquire about half the nation’s childcare centres, went belly up. We know that making vocational education and training ‘contestable’ was a costly disaster, as many private providers conned youngsters into signing up for unsuitable courses (and debt).”