I first came across the term moral injury during a work break, scrolling through Bond University’s research page, my casual employer at the time.

It sounded vaguely religious and a bit dramatic, and it sparked my curiosity. The article explained that moral injury is a term given to a form of psychological trauma experienced when someone is exposed to events that violate or transgress their deeply held beliefs of right and wrong, leading to biopsychosocial suffering.  

First used in relation to military service, moral injury was coined by military psychiatrist Jonathan Shay (2014) when he realised that therapy designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t effective for all service members. Shay used the term moral injury to describe a deeper wound carried by his patients, not from fear for their physical safety, but from violating their own morals or having them violated by leaders. The suffering experienced from exposure to violence was compounded by the damage to their identity and feeling like they’d lost their worth or goodness in the eyes of society and themselves. Insight into this hidden cost of trauma was an epiphany for me.  

I’m a secondary teacher by profession, but I’ve not been employed in the classroom for over 10 years. In fact, I haven’t been employed doing anything other than the occasional casual project since that time. Why? Was it burnout, stress, compassion fatigue, lack of resilience, or the ever-handy catch-all, poor mental health? No matter which explanation I considered, the result was the same: a growing sense of personal failure and creeping doubt about whether I’m cut out for any kind of paid work. Being introduced to the term moral injury was like turning a kaleidoscope; all the same colours tumbled into a dazzlingly different pattern. It gave me a fresh lens through which to view my painful experience of leaving the teaching profession. I needed to know more about moral injury, not only for myself, but also for my colleagues, the students and the profession that I love.

If just a glimpse of moral injury gave me hope that my distress in my role as a teacher wasn’t simply personal failure, imagine the impact a deep, shared understanding could have on our education system and wider community.

Within the month, I had written and submitted a research proposal to empirically investigate the impact of moral injury on teacher wellbeing in Australia.  

I discovered moral injury, while well-studied in various workforce populations, had received limited but significant empirical attention in the teaching profession. My research clearly showed that moral injury has a serious negative impact on teachers’ wellbeing and professional function. Crucially, it offered insight into why many teachers were experiencing intense psychological distress and a growing urge to leave the profession, even when poor working conditions and eroding public respect were the subject of policy and practice reform.   

What makes an event or situation potentially morally injurious is when it transgresses a deeply held value or belief about what is right or wrong. Research exploring moral injury in the teaching practice suggests that teachers hold shared values and beliefs about what good teaching means. Education researchers such as Thomas Albright, Lisa Gonzalves, Ellis Reid and Meira Levinson affirm that teachers aim to guide all students in gaining knowledge and skills while shaping their thinking and behaviour with an awareness of right and wrong, promoting social justice and challenging injustice. Researcher Yibing Quek highlights the development of respectful, critical thinking as a core educational goal that supports students in navigating life’s challenges. Scholars such as Erin Sugrue, Rachel Briggs, and L. Callid Keef-Perry emphasise that the goals of education are only achievable through relationships rooted in deep care, where teachers are responsive to students’ complex learning and wellbeing needs and attuned to ethical dilemmas requiring both compassion and justice. Though ethical dilemmas are inherent in teaching, researcher Dana Cohen-Lissman argues that many are generated from externally imposed policies, potentially leading to moral injury among teachers.  

Studies assert that teachers experience moral injury when systemic barriers and practice arrangements keep them from aligning their actions with their professional identity, educational goals, and core teaching values. Teachers exposed to the shortcomings of education and other systems often feel they are complicit in the harm inflicted on students. Researchers have consistently identified neoliberalism, social and educational inequities, racism, and student trauma as key factors contributing to experiences that lead to moral injury for teachers. These systemic problems place crippling pressure on individual teachers, both in the classroom and in leadership, to achieve the stated goals of education, despite policies that provide insufficient and unevenly distributed resources to do so.  

Furthermore, the high-stakes accountability demanded of individual employees fails to recognise the collective, community-oriented, interdependent nature of the work of teaching. The problem is that the gap between what is expected of teachers and what they can do is often blamed on them, and over time, they start to believe it of themselves. Naturally, these morally injurious experiences cause emotional distress, hinder job performance, and gradually erode teachers’ wellbeing and job satisfaction.  

Experiencing moral distress, witnessing harm to children, feeling betrayed by policymakers and the public, powerless to make meaningful change, and working without the rewards of service, teachers face difficult choices. They can respond to moral injury by quietly resisting, speaking out to demand understanding and systemic change or take what they believe to be the only ethical choice – leave the profession of teaching. But what if, instead of facing these difficult choices, teachers resorted to reductive moral reasoning – simplifying the complex ethical dilemmas piling up around them or ignoring them altogether – so they wouldn’t be disturbed by them? Numbing ethical sensitivity just to keep a job creates even more problems. 

Moral injury goes beyond personal failure or inadequacy; it acknowledges the broader systemic conditions that place teachers in situations where their ethical commitments increasingly clash with the neoliberal forces currently shaping education. Moral injury offers a language of lament, an explanation for the anguish experienced in the practice of teaching. An understanding of moral injury in the education sector invites society, collectively, to offer teachers fierce compassion and moral repair by restructuring the social systems that create these conditions. Adding moral injury to the discourse around teacher shortages may even help teachers offer fierce compassion to themselves. It did for me.

What do the recent Optus 000-incidents, childcare centre abuse allegations, and the Northern Beaches Hospital deaths have in common?  

Each of these incidents plausibly resulted from the privatisation of public services, in which the government has systematically disinvested funds and withdrawn oversight. 

On the 18th of September, Optus’ 000 service went down for the second time in two years. This time, the outage affected people in Western Australia, and as a result of not being able to get through to the 000 service, it appears that three people have died.  

This highlights a more general issue that we see in Australia across a range of public services, including emergency, hospital, and childcare services. The government has sought to privatise important parts of the care economy that are badly suited to generating private profits, leading to moral and practical problems. 

Privatisation of public services 

Governments in Australia follow economic strategies that can be described as neoliberal. This means that they prefer limited government intervention and favour market solutions to match the value that people are willing to pay with the value that people want to charge for goods and services.  

As a result, public goods and services like healthcare, energy, and telecommunications have been gradually sold off in Australia to private companies. This is because, firstly, it’s not considered within the government’s remit to provide them, and secondly, policy makers think the market will provide more efficient solutions for consumers than the government can.  

We see then, for example, a proliferation of energy suppliers popping up, offering the most competitive rates they can for consumers against the real cost of energy production. And we see telecommunications companies, like Telstra and Optus, emerging to compete for consumers in the market of cellular and internet services. 

So far, so good. In principle, these systems of competition should drive companies to provide the best possible services for the lowest competitive rates, which would mean real advantages for consumers. Indeed, many have argued that governments can’t provide similar advantages for consumers, given that they end up with no competition and no drive for technical improvements.  

However, the picture in reality is not so rosy.  

Public services: Some things just can’t be privatised  

There’s a term in economics called ‘market failure’. This describes a situation where, for a few different possible reasons, the market fails to efficiently respond to supply and demand flows, affecting the nature of public goods and services.  

A classic public good has two features: it is non-rival, and non-excludable. A non-rival good is one where one person’s use doesn’t deplete how much of that good is left for others – so we are not rivals because there is enough for everyone. A non-excludable good is one where my use of it doesn’t prevent anyone else from using it either. So, I can’t claim this good because I’m using it right now; it remains open to others to use.  

Consider a jumper. This is a rival and excludable good. If I purchase a jumper out of a stock of jumpers, there are fewer jumpers for you and everyone else who wants one. The jumper is a rival good. When I buy the jumper and wear it, no one else can buy it or wear it; it is an excludable good.  

Now, consider the 000 service. In theory, if you and I are both facing an emergency, we can both call 000 and get through to an operator. The 000 service is a non-rival, non-excludable good. It is not the sort of thing that anyone can deplete the stock of, nor can anyone exclude anyone else from using it.  

Such goods and services present a problem for the market. Private companies have little reason to provide public goods or services, like roads, street lights, 000 services, clean air, or public health care. That’s because these sorts of goods don’t return them much of a profit. There is little or no reason that anyone would pay to use these services when they can’t be excluded from their use and their stock won’t be depleted. Of course, that has not stopped governments from trying to privatise these things anyway, as we see from toll roads, 000, and private care.  

Public goods, private incentives 

The primary moral problem that arises in the privatisation of public goods and services is two-fold. First, it puts the provision of important goods and services in the hands of companies whose interests directly oppose the nature of the goods to be provided. Second, people are made vulnerable to an unreliable system of private provision of public goods and services.  

A private company’s main objective is to make the most possible profit for shareholders. Given that public goods will not make much of a profit, there is little incentive for a private company to give them attention. This means that essential goods and services, like the 000 service, are deprioritised in favour of those other services that will make the company more of a profit.

Further, people become vulnerable to unreliable service providers, as proper oversight and governance undercuts the profit of private companies. Any time a company has to pay for staff re-training, for revision of protocols, or firing and replacing an employee, they make their profits smaller. So, private companies have incentives to cut corners where they can, and oversight, governance, and quality control seem to be the most frequent things to go. 

Most of the time, these cut corners go unnoticed. Until, that is, something goes wrong with the service and people get hurt, or worse. 

So why does this system continue? 

Successive governments have made the decision to privatise goods and services, making their public expenditures smaller and therefore also making it look like they are being more ‘responsible’ with tax revenues. It’s an attractive look for the neoliberal government, which emphasises how small and non-interventionist it is. But is it working for Australians? 

It seems like the government’s quest for a smaller bottom line is at odds with the needs of Australian people. The stable provision of a 000 service, safe hospitals with appropriate oversight, and reliable childcare services with proper governance are all essential goods that Australians want, and which private companies consistently seem unable to provide.   

It’s a moral – if not economic – imperative that Australian governments reverse course and begin to provide essential goods and services again. The 000 service, the childcare system, and hospitals provide only a few examples of where the government’s involvement in providing public services is very obviously missing. People are getting hurt, and people are dying, for the sake of private profits.