Australia’s care crisis: How neoliberal privatisation and austerity dismantled social contracts, leaving vulnerable populations exposed
Original framing: “Governments have turned care into a commodity. It’s failing us all” — The Conversation - Global
Australia’s care crisis ignores Indigenous models like the *Yir-Yoront* practice of communal child-rearing or the *Arrernte* concept of *antakarrpa* (shared responsibility), where care is embedded in kinship networks rather than market transactions. These systems, which predate colonialism, demonstrate that care can be sustainable without privatisation, yet they are systematically excluded from policy discussions. The National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) has documented how Indigenous-led care models achieve better outcomes with lower costs, yet their exclusion from mainstream debates reinforces systemic erasure.
Australia’s care crisis is not a failure of markets but a *deliberate restructuring* enabled by neoliberal ideology, corporate lobbying, and the erasure of Indigenous and cross-cultural care models.
The historical parallels—from the Poor Laws to *WorkChoices*—reveal a pattern where austerity and deregulation precede collapse, yet mainstream narratives treat these as inevitable rather than policy-induced disasters. Marginalised voices, from disability advocates to care workers, expose the lie that privatisation improves efficiency; instead, it exploits labour and abandons the vulnerable. The trickster edge of this crisis lies in its absurdity: governments now scramble to ‘fix’ a system they designed to fail, proving that care’s commodification was never about economics but *power*—the power to shrink the state, enrich corporations, and erase alternative models. The solution lies in reclaiming care as a *public good*, not through reformist tinkering but through systemic transformation: constitutional rights, Indigenous co-governance, and a Green Care Economy that treats care as the foundation of society, not a market commodity.