This chapter traces the creation of a childcare market in New Zealand between 1989 and 2019. As a highly active political front for neoliberal politics, childcare has been shaped by quite differing understandings of what it is and how it should be organized over this period. However, despite different political parties in power, the fact that childcare is provided through a market-based system has remained constant, indicating the resilience and malleability of the market ideal. The research period in question details two key moments in the formation of the market; the Before Five reforms in 1989 and the Strategic Plan in 2002. The initial phase of marketization in 1989 led to the first major funding intervention into the sector: bulk funding. The second intervention 12 years later sought to remedy the issues of the first market framing and reflected a more active involvement by government in keeping with a social investment approach. In detailing the work of market making in this chapter, I will focus on the important differences between both phases of market creation. In doing so I will emphasize how the figure of the parent consumer has been understood within state-led marketization, as one of the key calculating actors charged with both regulating and governing the market. While I recount the emergence of the childcare market in New Zealand, in telling this story I also want to consider the highly experimental work of state-led marketization, as childcare policy making becomes an exercise in market organization (Frankel et al, 2019).

Bringing forward the analytical framework of SSM, there are two key arguments about state-led marketization which I will ground empirically in this chapter. Firstly, as discussed in Chapter 2, state-led marketization involves the creation of calculative agencies, capable of making differentiated and informed decisions about childcare in the emerging market. Picking up on the discussion of the parent consumer introduced in Chapter 2, I will show how this figure is not static in approaches to the market but is reframed in line with the two key periods of market creation in New Zealand. This analysis offers a different set of insights to the existing literature, which is typified by a discussion of how the rational parent consumer ideal deviates in reality from how parents meet their childcare needs.