https://www.abc.net.au/religion/covid-reality-check-for-the-lucky-country/13519722
"How is it that such a wealthy country — a country where people previously took pride in their ingenuity and solidarity in the face of hardship — could end up with this combination of meanness, panic, and lack of coordination?"
- Toby Carrol, ABC Religion and Ethics, 30th Aug 2021
In diagnosing how a thing happened, investigators will generally try to establish what the initial conditions and causes were, before the thing happened. For instance, one of the reasons why you can be sure that the universe is neither infinite nor infinitely old, is that the night sky is dark. If that was true, then there should have been an infinite number of stars whose light had an infinite amount of time get here. If that was true, then night time should not exist but it does.
If diagnosing how a country which previously displayed ingenuity and solidarity in the face of hardship, you have to establish how it developed those things in the first place and why it could lose them.
There are in fact only two ways to rule and govern effectively because the state in order to have any kind of legitimacy needs to own and operate a monopoly of violence (that's kind of the central definition of who or what is sovereign in a state). Failure to exact judgement and justice upon transgressors of the law, is a state of lawlessness because law is a three ring circus; where the three rings are legislation, interpretation, and enforcement. Those two ways in a democracy are either by counting heads and by carrying everyone along, or by cracking heads and by pushing and/or chaining everyone to the program for governance.
Australia, as a nation which was formed after the Chartists, Reformist, Trade Unionists, and Suffragettes, had all pushed their way into the franchise, was then forged by the First World War, the 1918-20 Flu Pandemic, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. These things for the duration and creation of two whole generations of people, forged with a steely reserve, the ideas that nationhood and arriving at collective action solutions for very large scale problems and projects, was a worthwhile cause.
As a generational issue, the collective apparatus and the underlying cultural sense of community which underpinned it (and which built the welfare state and what used to be massive public infrastructure), was built by the Lost, Greatest and Silent Generations. The Baby Boomers who never lived through any of those experiences, also didn't have to build anything. Generation X and Y witnessed most of those apparatus being dismantled and privatised before their eyes, and have been brought up without the expectation that they won't work. Generations Z and Alpha, have practically nothing to inherit.
In conducting the kind of show that happens in the three ring circus, Australia went from a place where everyone in the big tent had their heads counted, to a set of conditions where the ringmaster and a few clowns now go around cracking heads. As the circus moves on, those who don't have power are bound and chained to all the places that they never wished to stay.
"A lot of it has to do with fundamental transformations in state and society over the last four decades and the emergence of a form of Antipodean exceptionalism derived from relative prosperity and isolation, and the perception that the rest of the world has entered the end times."
- Toby Carrol, ABC Religion and Ethics, 30th Aug 2021
Kind of.
Real wages peaked in the western world in or about 1975-80. This came after a series of oil crises and labour market shocks. It also happened after that curious period when across the white world, people who were descended from ex-colonial possessions also started pushing into the franchise asking for civil rights.
The response to this, from a generation which had never known hardship was to elect governments which over the course of twenty years, degraded, defunded, privatised, and sold off the infrastructure which had previously held society together. That process began in about 1980.
At the same time, while the economic left was smashed to pieces, what was left of those political parties shifted to try and gain ground with the progressive and libertarian south. The economic right which was culturally conservative, aided and abetted by commercial media companies, after having dealt with the economic left, was more than happy to abandon the cause of liberalism if it meant that conservative, authoritarian, and economically rightist governments were elected.
Australia from 1975, after having a progressive and economically leftist government fired, began to shift to the economic right. The Fraser, Hawke, Keating and especially the Howard Government, went through a process of so-called economic rationalism, while the Howard Government them went and changed the taxation base to more or less permanently ensure that the people who benefited from the process, no longer had to pay for that benefit.
On the 3rd of March 2003, the then Treasurer Peter Costello announced that Australian Government net debt was officially zero. It was a con job. Debt was paid off by selling off all of the silverware and by pushing the burden of taxation onto poorer people who couldn't escape it, via the GST.
Rather than building for the future, the Howard Government returned the benefits of the 00's resources boom, to the hands of the few. That wealth still exists. It is just parked in property and as ever more of the economy has been chucked aside, that's where it has stayed.
It's all very well to specifically design a country where government step away but in the event of a national emergency, the insurance policy that you should have had, has already been cashed out. One thing that I have noticed during these past 21 months is that the expertise which would have existed within Government, simply isn't there any more. That means that governments have paid premiums for external consultants but who have produced rather useless advice.
We have ended up with this particular combination of lack of coordination, leading to panic because those people who are in charge expect the government to do nothing most of the time and resent the fact that it might be asked to.
In short, the people who control the banks, the mines, the big industries, the press and the means by which the people get their living, act in their own interest and run private monopolies, oligarches, for their own benefit. They feel no responsibility to the nation whatsoever. As a result, the people who previously took pride in their ingenuity and solidarity in the face of hardship , are now forced to fend for themselves. Legislation has been enacted which actively smashed their solidarity and which Thomas Hobbes called a "state of nature" and of which the John Rawls said in his 1971 book "A Theory of Justice" that:
People live behind a veil of ignorance that prevents them from knowing how they may benefit from society. They lack foreknowledge of their intelligence, wealth, or abilities.
Who owns the veil; who is it designed for? Follow the money and that will give you the answer of why we got here and for whose benefit.
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