To make sense of Australia’s childcare system in 2020, consider the laryngeal nerve of the giraffe.

Like all vertebrates, a giraffe’s voice box is connected to its brain via two nerves. One of them, the superior laryngeal, takes a five-centimetre direct route. The other, the recurrent laryngeal, takes a bizarre five-metre detour, shooting past the voice box all the way down to a main artery near the heart, where it does a U-turn and returns back up the other side of the neck.