Nobody Is Looking After Mary. And Here's Why.

Series note: This series examines how decisions are actually made — not to excuse outcomes, but to understand them accurately.

By Aiden Garrison

Nobody is looking after Mary.

She's 75. Widowed. No children. She slipped in the shower, broke her hip, and was medically cleared for discharge weeks ago.

She's still in a hospital bed at $2,000 a day.

Last week I wrote about Mary. The response showed how many people recognise her story in a ward, in their family, or in their own fears for the future.

What I didn't fully explain is why this keeps happening. Not the familiar federal-state blame game. The deeper reason.

There is a sincere belief, held by decent people, that private enterprise has no legitimate role in human services. That any need for return on capital inevitably turns the frail and the forgotten into profit centres.

This view was forged in real failures — privatisations that stripped services to the bone, extracted value upward, and left the most vulnerable with less. It is not cynicism. It is principle.

But principles have consequences.

Because of it, public-private partnerships that could deliver supported living placements — the very thing Mary needs — are blocked, delayed, or strangled in red tape. The ideology meant to protect the vulnerable instead traps them in the most expensive, least suitable place possible: an acute hospital bed. All to avoid the contamination of profit.

Mary pays $2,000 a day for someone else's ideological purity.

The state pays $2,000 a day to avoid a model that might cost $300.

I'm not here to offer a white paper or a list of demands. This is an introduction to a problem, to a pattern, and to a question I intend to spend the next several months trying to answer properly.

Because this pattern is not uniquely Australian. Other countries have found workable balances public accountability paired with private capacity, rather than locked in opposition.

The Netherlands has built supported living infrastructure that would astonish most Australians. Argentina developed resilient community models under brutal fiscal constraints. Hong Kong has pragmatically blended state responsibility with private delivery in ways that are genuinely instructive.

I intend to go and speak to the people who designed those systems. Not to import them wholesale. But to understand what they got right, what they got wrong, and what Australia could realistically adopt.

That work will take time. It won't start tomorrow.

But it starts here.

Because Mary is still in that hospital bed. Every extra day costs the taxpayer more than a month's salary while she loses muscle, dignity, and time.

The least I can do is find out whether someone, somewhere, has already figured out how to help her.