Continual crises in all the health, education and human services industries are no longer “exceptions”. They are continuous chronic symptoms of what’s wrong with our neoliberalised, marketised “care economy”.

Childcare this week, NDIS last week, aged care the week before, mental health… The list is endless. And each time a new crisis blows up, out come the pollies with the same solution, another round of whackamole regulation.

Compliance surveillance, “evidence-based data”, auditing and accreditation, it’s a Groundhog Day of the same economic rationalist BS that we’ve been swimming in since the 80s.

And nothing ever improves.

So how can we “come out from under” the mountain of crises in the worlds of health, education and human services?

By creating relationships of care in the local governance of all these services. By selecting local people who understand their local community cultural contexts, and who can develop trust-based connections with the staff, “consumers and carers” and local communities that these services are meant “to serve”.

It’s not rocket science. And regulatory mechanisms need to also be built on relational models of collaboration between the services and those responsible for assessing their “efficiency and effectiveness”. These are delicate issues that need to be monitored and evaluated and reported on in collaborative ways. Not by fear-driven policing.

Abusers, manipulators and shonks will find ways around the rules every time. But organisations that run on local relationships of care will pick up problems much faster than inspectors conducting compliance surveillance with forensic attention to “the evidence base”.

Triangulating evidence, from the organisations’ written reports and statistics, the verbal witnessing and testimony of customers and staff, and the personal observations of the assessors, can only go so far in holding the system to account.

We need local representatives of local communities to hold positions of responsibility on the governance committees of the schools, childcare, aged care, disability support, mental health and addiction support services across our society.

And these people need to be given delegation over budgets and programs, staffing and planning, so they can shape the services to best suit and serve their communities. Not be hidebound by cookie-cutter policies and funding parameters that squeeze the life out of local community identities.

Currently, such a scenario is impossible to imagine because the personal liabilities faced by community directors are terrifying. The insurance industry’s stranglehold on every breath we take being “publicly liable”, means no one wants that responsibility anymore.

But if we exercise some true discretionary judgment, and provide appropriate training and support for local “governors”, they might start showing up to help reclaim local caring ownership of those care services that help to keep the heartbeat of our communities going.

This is the true challenge facing our society. To reclaim our social agency, reinvest in the common good, and make accountability into a truly interactive process, rather than another echo of our penal colony past.

The other issue is about “pay and conditions”. Not just in the industrial sense of workplace accountability and fairness, but also about realising the true productivity return on investment when society’s social and emotional well-being is being properly cared for “in community”, rather than “in the clinic”.

It is much more cost-effective to have people gathering in groups for their health and well-being experiences than having them go through the revolving door of the clinical medical model one-on-one acute care model.

This is the best way to improve productivity in the care economy – have it happening in local settings all over the country, governed, managed and staffed by locals, who get properly paid for what they do. Holding our social fabric together, and keeping the Commonweal oiled and rolling smoothly.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.