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The balance between public law, private law and civil society has long attracted interest. As state or public functions have contracted in recent decades, much recent scholarly attention has been devoted to the erosion of public accountability associated with neoliberal 'contracting-out' of formerly government delivered services or responsibilities (often termed new public management or 'NPM'). The resultant exclusion of access to public law remedies to correct abuses of services or functions now discharged by so-called 'third-party' providers is one such long-standing concern, but even basic data collection of key performance indicators was found to be problematic in a public mental health study conducted in Western Australia, due to undue devolution and fragmentation of administration. Another illustrative concern in the literature is the trade-off between expansion of individual autonomy at the price of having …