To the fury of politicians and commentators, large numbers of Australians clearly aren’t interested in social distancing. They’re still flocking to beaches and congregating in bars and insisting on maintaining their normal, sociable lives.
Beaches and bars have now been shut down, amid scolding of those not taking the threat of the virus seriously enough.
Some blame mixed messaging. It’s barely a week since the prime minister declared he was going to the footy and encouraging Australians to go about their lives, to go on being Australian, while the chief medical officer was happily shaking hands.
But the messages were only mixed for those actually paying attention. Those engaged in public life, and those of us who pay close attention to them, regularly forget how little attention vast swathes of the population pay to politics and news media.
Messages about density, distance and other subtleties of minimising the risk of infection are likely not registering with large numbers of Australians, let alone shifting behaviour. Especially when the NRL insists on blithely continuing its season.
The failure has prompted much more draconian restrictions from governments, which public health experts have been demanding for some time. Command and control is embedded deep in the mindset of population-health academics, who see the public as a mass of bad habits and poor decision-making in need of constant correction via compulsion or incentive by those who know better.
The behaviour of large numbers of people in ignoring social distancing will inspire countless theses and academic papers in the years ahead, all centring on the theme of the need for greater social marketing and control.
A point that’s been forgotten in the headlong rush into crisis over the last ten days, but which a lot of us were talking about prior to that, is the issue of trust in governments, which was at historic lows prior to the crisis.
Many of us fretted, and still fret, that that lack of trust would corrode the beneficial effects of the government’s stimulus packages. Less examined was the possibility that it might also undermine compliance with public health measures.
Not through active mistrust in what officials, elected and otherwise, were saying about the virus, or in conspiracy theories, although there’s been plenty of those, but through general disengagement with anything coming out of the political system.
That system, after all, is seen by the majority of voters as being run by self-interested politicians for a few big interests, rather than for the benefit of all Australians. That is, it’s not a system that is particularly relevant to many voters.
So when politicians — and the rest of us in Australia’s governing class, which includes the media, academia and business leaders — scold Australians for their public health recalcitrance, we’re harvesting a crop we ourselves have sown over the last decade and a bit, since 2007 when levels of trust in government and politicians were at all-time highs.
Leaders can’t alienate large numbers of voters with their self-interested behaviour and then expect automatic engagement and compliance when things go JG Ballard on us.
The contrast with the bushfire crisis — which now seems a distant memory from a kinder, gentler world — is significant and noteworthy. That was much less about compliance with directives, but the instinctive response of so many Australians was to give generously to those who’d suffered.
That is, Australians respond with generosity to their own community and to fellow Australians.
The mistake our leaders have made has been to fail to emphasise that exactly the same generosity of spirit is now required; that Australians must sacrifice again to help protect those who are most vulnerable, among their own families, neighbours and community.
Anything else requires the building-up of trust, something hard to win and easily lost. And our leaders have spent years squandering it.
When you rail against the Canberra bubble (for effect), from inside the Canberra bubble ….?
And if the topic is “How governments are reaping what they’ve sown” take a look at the UK?
How much has the governments, that Bozo has been a member of, saved by ripping into the NHS? How much will they save now by not being able to afford to build all those hospitals he campaigned/gulled on building?
And how much of the NHS budget been given to the co-located Ramsay hospitals??
Terrific analysis- perfidious politicians have seriously damaged the public perception of government.
People trust our present government implicitly – to do everything which they can to further their own advantages.
To hell with the common folk; they are disposable.
What a load of rubbish. People went to the beach because it was a nice day and people always go to the beach on a nice day, because it’s a good and healthy place to be. Closing beaches is a ridiculous and unnecessary measure.
Entirely agree.
Not at that level of crush, though.
Yes – total beach shutdown was overkill & ‘unaustralian’’. At least we got one dose of footy in (irony intended).
That said public transport is running when perhaps other arrangements should be made to ensure travel for clearly designated emergency workers and those with medical evidence of their requirement for a specific journey – surely taxi drivers could be employed by the state for the period of this emergency?
The general mass still think we are in the empire of the sun while we are clearly being ruled by the virus for the foreseeable future. In fairness, most of our politicians are getting up to speed on this. The most important issue is whether our medical stocks will be sufficient, especially regarding breathing assistance – not holding my breath on that one, I fear.
Has this government actually ever looked ahead and done something sensible??
The ATM government has been a shocker.
A deficit of trust is a polite way to describe the dearth of respect that most people I know have for politicians – of any side, the ALP and Greens included. But the LNP is arguably out there in front with sports rorts, money for ‘overland flows’ to tax havens, the AFP deciding not to investigate the Honourable Mr Angus Taylor and personnel such as scomatose and Barnaby Joke running around making us all feel safe and secure after a long history of children overboard, WMDs, helicopter flights and sundry other matters such as ‘carbon tax’ lies.
In too many matters the ALP has tagged along nodding agreement to increased ‘security’ measures that simply erode democracy while being compicit in what we did to East Timor as well as kowtowing to the gambling indutsry.
There is simply so much about our ‘ruling class’ that is either crooked or inept at every level from local government (where well paid councillors don’t seem to be able to see that using ratepayers’ money for personal entertainment might present a problem), state government (where left wing politians employ standard techniques such as family trusts and others build stadiums that the sports industry should pay for) and the federal government where a marketing failure elected by a bunch who got less than 42% of the vote tries to claim that he doesn’t have to answer questions about his lies and his mates, the ones censured by a Royal Commission.
Yes there is a deficit of trust and I doubt that we can do much about it as long as career politics carries forward and those benefitting from it continue to erode democracy. Watch what is happening in the USA in that regard if you want to be really scared. They have more guns per person there than most people here but there are people here that talk about using them as well.
The last politician speaking about a public health issue that I listened to, was President Reagan speaking about the “gay flu” and he took all of the politicians of the future’s credibility out with him.
He did not mis-speak or respond stupidly to a union demand, or, release thousands of passengers into Sydney from a ship with an infection on board. These are called mistakes.
Reagan deliberately denied the existence of, and then when he could no longer deny its existence, he dismissed it as the “gay flu”.
A politician was responsible for an epidemic which still has outbreaks through out the world and has cost millions of lives and destroyed many children’s futures.
This why the Chief Medical Officer and his deputy Brendan Murphy and Paul Kelly are the people to be doing the talking and should be given the respect that they actually deserve and are most certainly earning.
If you think about it, all others are giving their speculation and opinion.
I didn’t see this when we had fires burning, did you?
CMO Brendan Murphy was compromised when he sat with “alas poor Yorick” Hunt on Insiders during that whole debacle when he also went in shaking everyone’s hand except Peter van Onselen who Yorick then publicly castigated on the show for giving medical advice.
Later in the day, the grinning fool in the baseball cap, who couldn’t get a handshake if he wanted to during the “Morrison Bushfires”, banned handshakes outright. He may have seemed selfish but those two, Hunt and Murphy, are the least credible people giving advice at the moment.
Murphy has even been compromised even further by accepting a job as Head of Health.
Go to the footy, go to school, get a haircut, everyone with a job is an “essential worker”.
FMD what a cock up on a massive scale. Anyone who watches the news services would not take their advice, losers.
Labor will be cleaning this mess up for bloody decades to come.