Australia Beyond COVID

At the time of writing this the penny has not quite dropped for a lot of Australians on the broad implications COVID 19. Still we congregate in parks and beaches in a manner that is less about noble defiance and more about wilful ignorance. The disease threatening the world is, to many of us, a story that happens on the tele at night from which we are firmly insulated by a sheet of glass as thick as our skulls.

The belief underpinning it all is Australian exceptionalism - that we on our massive continent, exist on a scale and remoteness that renders us immune to it all. It follows our anxiety with refugees - that somebody, no matter how pathetic, may breach our island fortress unravels this assumption. It represents the world and all its problems coming to knock and we don’t like it one little bit. Hence the overamped macho style response: Operation Sovereign Borders.

So too our scepticism of official expert sources. We are a whole nation plugging our ears with our fingers and drunkenly howling the national anthem. It is the mistrust of the educated that runs deep deep in our Australian soul - that never will academic credentials and a lifetime’s study in a field trump homegrown instincts of the man on the land or the guy at the end of the bar.

Even our prime minister’s whole shtick is pretending to be an ordinary Joe despite having attended an exclusive selective high schools and with evangelical leanings that most Aussies find deeply suspect. Of course he’s not the only PM to make the ordinary Joe play - nor the only world leader for that matter - but for most other countries this burst of populism is a recent phenomenon - for us, with our entrenched tall poppy syndrome, it is a prerequisite.

All this mistrust of objective knowledge is about to come crashing down of course. And the landing will not be soft. Where other countries prone to isolation and exceptionalism (US and UK) are more sober about future prospects thanks to eating dirt during the GFC, we have been able to maintain the illusion of immunity for another decade. Not anymore.

The crash will first be felt as an economic one. Economics is an arcane and abstract art and makes about as much sense to us Aussies as a broken ATM that sometimes gives out free money. We don’t trust it but we need it. Our lack of understanding makes us easier to manipulate. For example we’re happy to be told franking credits is free money and sign on no further questions necessary. Instead we navigate the subject by hearsay and instinct. And so, the assumptions baked within our economic model remain unchallenged.

Most prominent is how finely tuned this model is to the presumption that the good times will never stop rolling. For the past forty years, the drive has been to aggressively stamp out inefficiencies meant to cushion us from tough times. In business such an appetite may belong but for the past four decades business has swallowed up the public sector - in areas like mental health, aged care, healthcare, telecommunications, tertiary education and welfare. Efficiency is cast as inherently good - but it’s in times of hardship that you need redundancy. That is, you need to deliver services in places that do not turn a profit and never will.

Here are some questions that should articulate the connection between tuning services to a good-times-will-always roll reality: Do we have enough ICU beds to handle a health crisis like a pandemic? Does it seem like our threadbare mental health services are now needed more than ever? What happens when Australians desperate to pay the rent have to wait hours on a call the Centrelink? Wouldn’t it have been nice to have a sovereign wealth fund from the mining boom? How are underfunded aged care facilities coping? What happens to universities now a huge slice of the income they rely on has been taken away?

Some scenarios that are worth considering:

• A couple both just made redundant. They have 2 children who have just taken out a mortgage on a house at a rate that will take 30 years to repay.
• What are the prospects of an 80 year old in an overcrowded nursing home?
• Someone that has been on the waiting list for critical surgery now delayed thanks to the influx of COVID cases.

It will be through story after story like these that reveal the stark contradictions inherent in our economic thinking. They had remained offstage purely thanks to good luck but will now rise to the top.

The fallout of a system hollowed out buckling under the pressure is predictable. Yet from this crisis and the ensuing fallout is an opportunity for Australians to re-calibrate their thinking to something a little bit more aligned with how we present ourselves on tourism commercials. These can best be expressed as a reevaluation of some vital relationships:

Between us and business #

We have been mining the hell out of this country and now, in a moment of crisis, don’t have anything to show for it but a charred landscape. Norway created a sovereign wealth fund from their resources boom. They are funding their COVID response without borrowing - simply by dipping into that immense pool of cash.

Our prospects of recovery are grim. Ours is a service economy and so deeply exposed when people stay at home. Before the mining boom the economy was far more diverse and so our resilience was far better. Hopefully this crisis will awaken Australians to be more sceptical about easy money and sold-off assets.

Yet smaller, local businesses are going to struggle through the next year. As they begin to close either for the long-term or forever, it will become very clear the character and services that small businesses provided, especially in contrast to the homogeneous big supermarket and shopping centre.

Between us and each other #

How many relationships were not based on socialising, work or family? Business and services have penetrated our society so completely that the idea of cooperation and community seemed fringe and archaic. In the vacuum left by services and businesses rolled back there could be an opportunity to rediscover a collective identity. This could begin with local initiatives - already the streets in my area are full of chalk and people are trading preserves. It sounds quaint but it’s a first vital step. In the country, always much better at this, are stories of boxes of fruit and vegies left on doorsteps without any money changing hands.

From this seed could grow a wider solidarity in which a new type of relationship not based on money but cooperation - that of local community. This might sound absurd and idealistic but some of the fruits to come from the Great Depression was a deep sense of connectedness outside business and government. It proved a powerful force bulwark against corporate and government overreach and could again do so.

Between us and the wider world #

If COVID has proven anything it is that Australia cannot rely on its remote location to keep a crisis at bay. Our economy relies on worldwide trade yet we maintain a reptilian fear of the outsider.

The dream is that COVID could awaken a sense of universality - that the virus does not discriminate on geography or race or class. This could spur on a greater openness in Australia’s foreign policy and domestic mindset - where we earnestly engage with the greater world - rather than the cynical transactional mode through which we currently operate.

Between us and our leaders #

In a time of crisis spin is no longer going to cut it. Previously we had to rely on a long cycle before lies were exposed. There was enough flex in the system to absorb incompetence, enough ambiguity to explain it away. Who had the attention span to wait out the results of a Royal Commission? Not me.

Now there is no wiggle room for leaders to be inept or blame the last guy/girl. Excuses will not cut it, lies will be quickly and unambiguously revealed. Competence will be valued at a premium. This emergency is a ruthless moment to which our expectations of our leaders can be tuned. Anything falling short should experience a consequent lack of faith that will blemish them and pack them off to an early retirement.

Between us and nature #

It should be evident to Australians now that you can look out the window and everything appear relatively normal yet a crisis is unfolding worldwide. This is the idea of a slow disaster. A more technical definition would read: In a slow disaster action is vital at a time before the consequences of inaction begin.

COVID and climate change are slow disasters. Underpinning both is the myth that nature is a benign economic resource there to exploit. This myth is maintainable within the context of a slow disaster because it can be sustained before consequences arrive.

Yet COVID is medium-term while climate change is long-long term. This means we have now witnessed the price of decisive inaction in a slow disaster - in the packed hospital wards of Italy and fork-lifters hauling bodies into refrigerated semitrailers in New York. These are the images that will refute the notion that the inertia of normality is unstoppable. The analogy between Climate change and COVID if drawn often and convincingly enough could mean energy and resolve towards solving COVID can be re-channelled to climate change. So the hope goes.

This is a rethink of the relationship to nature because it could develop a general intuitive understanding of the slow cycle of nature. It is a lack just such an understanding that has landed us in the present ecological catastrophe. COVID could prove that just because stuff seems normal doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry.

COVID will continue to be felt beyond the immediate impact of the virus itself. For the most part it will be a continuation of the same old story: despite the indiscriminate nature of the virus itself those with money will fare better than those without. But contained within it are opportunities for Australians to re-evaluate perspectives, to test assumptions and dispel illusions. There exist the possibility of catching the sclerotic power structures momentarily off balance and interrogating them beyond the scope of the immediate crisis and enact meaningful change.