The lives of all Australians are profoundly affected by the quality of social services available, but a long list of royal commissions and public inquiries has revealed them to be failing. In The Careless State Mark Considine shows that the preferred framework for social service policy provision, since the 1980s, can now be seen conclusively to have failed. Weak quality control, systematic rorting, and entrenched disadvantage have become the norm. Considine points to ways that reforms could be configured to get the best from both private and public agencies.