We have already seen the collapse of ABC Learning Centres, Australia's largest child care provider. The costs associated with aged care are so high that it is certain many of the businesses running aged care services will be subject to intense financial pressure, and some may go under.
The Victorian bushfires forced people to think about the costs and values associated with living in the bush. It has become obvious that changes are necessary, and that perhaps humans should not live in areas prone to fires. The financial meltdown will in turn make us consider how we provide care for those close to us, at vulnerable stages of their lives, and how, and indeed whether, we should pay for it.
In this month's Faith Doing Justice newsletter, Sandie Cornish asks what happens to us when we commodify solidarity and respect for human dignity by outsourcing care. Her assumption is that care is something that is best done at home, but that various mitigating factors often require us to purchase human care as products and services in the marketplace.
She suggests that delegating our commitment to protecting and promoting the wellbeing of others 'flies in the face of the principle of solidarity, which ... encourages us to imagine ourselves in the place of others'.
Her point is that the very humanity of those 'excused' from caring is diminished. Many of us go to work in battery hen style so that we can afford to have our children cared for in child care centres, which also commodify them. That is a caricature, but it does make us wonder whether life is passing us by.
Correspondingly, many of us consider our lives incomplete if our professional lives are disrupted or cut short by the duty of care for family members. Work is invariably an important part of who we are.
The principle that causes us to scrutinise the outsourcing of care could be used as an excuse for the Federal Government to do nothing in the wake of the ABC Learning Centres collapse, and to ignore the need for adequate funds for professional aged care, especially with the impending retirement of baby boomers.
However the opposite is true. What human dignity requires more than anything else is the freedom for individuals and their loved ones to choose what together makes them more human.
Michael Mullins is editor of Eureka Street.
On the Web: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/