We have publicly owned primary schools, secondary schools and universities. Yet do we have public childcare centres? If we do not, is it something worth introducing?
In Australia, we don't. Is it worth it? Welllllll... basically, we can't afford everything.
By their very nature, education and healthcare are things you can always spend more money on. An older gentlemen who came to my gym, his son died in his 40s of a surprise cancer - healthy lifestyle, regular basic checkups, no family history, just has some pain in his lower chest, lots of tests, "woops, you're dying in six months."
Now, if every general practitioner had an MRI and everyone got full-body scans every three months, that would catch a lot of issues early on, and that guy wouldn't have died. But they cost $10 million and require a staff of 12 all of whom require a tertiary education and then spread across the country... so, we decide that it's not worth spending hundreds of billions for a few lives. It would be too expensive to save you. Sorry.
Likewise, if every child had an individual tutor, they would do better than they do in a class of 20. But are we prepared to spend 20 times as much on teacher salaries, and on the tertiary education for them, and so on?
Obviously those are absurd examples, but they illustrate the point that healthcare and education spending really have no upper limit. And so we make decisions based on "bang for the buck." For example, if secondary and primary school were not compulsory, a significant chunk of the population wouldn't send their kids to them - already many schools in lower income areas have huge problems with child absences, there are children who only make 20% of school days. Half the population would be totally illiterate if it weren't compulsory. So we make it compulsory. But it's a bit harsh to make it compulsory and then demand from the parents $14k annually per primary and $18k per secondary student (the current state and federal primary/secondary education budgets divided by the number of students). So we fund it publicly and just ask for token contributions from parents, which low income parents can have waived.
So, absent a primary and at least most of a secondary education, people will be illiterate and innumerate and unable to function in a modern industrial society, let alone a technological society. But take away preschool stuff... and nothing awful happens to the children. It makes no difference to my 3yo whether she plays with blocks at childcare, or plays with blocks during a playdate with other kids.
I mean, if primary school suddenly cost $20k annually, we would find the money somehow, because it's so important. But childcare? We'd just take her out and I'd look after her at home and be less lazy about arranging playdates.
Thus, any childcare subsidies are not for the benefit of the children, but the parents, and (we hope) thus indirectly for society generally. Society benefits, the theory goes, from having adults out of the home working and earning money. And if we also subsidise tertiary education there's also an argument there - if society has spent $100,000 educating an engineer, we'd rather have them out there engineering than wiping bums at home.
Of course there are also social and familial benefits to having someone at home with the children. Children of absent parents are more likely to grow up to be teenaged parents, criminal, have mental health issues and so on. Children with a stable and warm household tend to do better, even if the household's not that well-off or educated.
Where to put things in the balance is not clear. So in practice the question is an ideological one. For example, feminism says, "we must have childcare benefits, so women can work." But this assumes that only women can be at home with the children, which is an odd thing for a feminist to assume. Of course that's what we usually see, but feminism like any ideology should surely be about changing things. And in a man-woman couple, "women should go out and do paid work" can be "so there should be childcare benefits," or it can be, "so the man should stay at home." Either fulfil the condition. But ideology doesn't recognise alternatives. Likewise the Liberal Party ideology inspired by conservative Christianity wanting women to stay at home and bake cookies, etc.
And of course ideology is informed by self-interest. Educated professionals earning high salaries believe in government-subsidised childcare. In other news, farmers believe in agricultural subsidies, old retirees believe in franking credits, and real estate agents believe in negative gearing, while the unemployed are quite taken by the idea of an increase in Newstart.
All are reasonable positions to take. But we can't afford everything. I don't know where the balance lies, but I suspect that free public childcare is just too expensive compared to the benefits. Subsidised... well, that's arguable. All I know is that a lot of the babble about it could be silenced if we had more men step up and do their job as fathers. Past the day the baby stops breastfeeding, there's nothing a stay at home mother can do for their child which the child's father can't.