A professional counterpart of mine was fond of explaining his philosophy of management: “Workers respect what managers inspect.”
He was wrong. The only emotions his workers felt were fear and loathing. Nevertheless those sentiments will get you a form of compliance — for a while.
There’s not much different in the way various Australian governments have been trying to to manage us, the people, in the pandemic. It has been a consistently solid mix of patronage and punishment.
This is not surprising. Conventional corporate management theory — predominant since corporations became a thing, and turbo-charged once “human resources” had been elevated to a science — has always dictated that people cannot be trusted to behave otherwise than self-interestedly unless appropriately motivated by reward and consequences.
Because the political class and the modern public service are indistinguishable from the management tier of private enterprise (as they comprise the same people moving seamlessly back and forth), quite naturally the underlying Hobbesian assumption — that we are all, at heart, dickheads — has permeated policy making and, more importantly, how government behaves on the rare occasions when it is forced to actually do something.
COVID-19 is one of those occasions, although Prime Minister Scott Morrison is proving adept at exploiting the quirks of our federal system to shove almost all the burden of action on to the states.
Premiers manage by instinct and appetite
The state premiers are, to a man and woman, managerial by instinct and appetite. They manage us non-stop, alternately congratulating us for being good girls and boys by “following the rules” and threatening us with ever-expanding penal consequences if we don’t keep it up.
Like perpetually exasperated parents, our leaders wag their fingers and pat our heads. Every now and then Morrison comes in over the top for some performative uber-dadding, as when he berated us for panic-buying (“Stop it!”) or for not caring as much about the lives of old people as he does.
There’s nothing malign or intentionally divisive about this aspect of the governmental approach to surviving COVID-19 (putting aside Morrison’s rank cynicism). It simply marks the limits of the imaginations of the people we’ve placed in charge, and they reflect the basic philosophy of capitalism.
The funny thing, though, is that we have always known the prevailing theory of what motivates people to act in their collective interest is completely wrong.
It is not how functional families and relationships operate, nor how successful sports teams, ensembles, campaigns or movements are organised.
Every exemplar of communal achievement demonstrates over and over again that it is neither the desire for material reward nor the fear of punishment that causes people to work together for the common good.
We are, fundamentally, social beings
Sure the argument has been running since the enlightenment as to whether we are inherently good beings subject to evil temptation, or by nature only interested in communal action when it also serves ourselves. But there’s no getting away from the simple truth that we are social beings.
Nevertheless it was assumed from the outset of COVID-19 that the only way to get a whole population to act in its collective interest was by coercion.
We have been living under the extraordinarily draconian legal structures of the Biosecurity Act 2015 and its state counterparts ever since.
It’s a given that most of the population would have complied with public health advice and the necessary measures to mitigate the risk regardless. It’s also a given that a small minority would not, and that COVID-19 will always find the weak spot.
Can you hold a virus at bay from 25 million people indefinitely by force of law? You can get people to comply in the short term with almost any set of rules by threatening them.
History, however, offers no examples of long-term success for that strategy (appreciating that success and compliance are not the same thing).
Much as our leaders persist in wishing, this is not a short-term problem and there is no normal to which we will return. They cannot coerce us forever without our society beginning to fracture along the fault lines that existed before COVID brought the ceiling down.
What our governments are doing is keeping us in a state of suspended fear, corralling us with offers of praise and warnings of punishment. What they are failing to do is to see the opportunity that COVID presents: a better society in every way.
True leadership would point us in that direction and motivate us to take the hits of today in the common cause of tomorrow.
However, as we do not have leaders who can — or dare to — imagine, we’ll plough on, being managed.
People will generally comply so long as they see their privations/restrictions rewarded by decreasing infections rates and deaths. We can look overseas and see how devastating it can be not to take the virus seriously and Victoria can look to other states and NZ to see what is possible in our own corner of the world. But the rules need to be clear, logical and based on the best scientific knowledge at the time with a clear explanation why they are being tightened or relaxed.
I fear that the federal government is using the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic to embed longer term constraints on our freedoms, our right to know how decisions are being made and who is influencing and benefiting from those decisions. The cloak of secrecy and lack of scrutiny afforded by the virus means that things like ‘a gas led recovery’ and increased powers to Dutton will be a fait accompli.
The opportunity to move more towards a Scandinavian system, with much better social structures and government supports does not appear to be a likely outcome of the current disruption, no matter how desirable that might be.
Leaving the country is a real consideration for me at the moment.
I’ll see how it goes, I do share your thoughts that the federal government is using the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic to embed longer term constraints on our freedoms, and I believe that the Victorian State government has also joined the fray with relish.
Given the quarantine fiasco here in Victoria, any rational person would doubt this governments ability to manage future problems, which no doubt will arise, other than locking everybody down again and again.
Hoping for a better Australia, but fearing that escape may be the only viable option.
I can’t imagine where you think might be better – please send a postcard if you find such a Xanadu.
Possibly, it’s a vibe man, it’s a vibe, and Victoria is losing it. I’ll be too busy being free to send postcards. Or dying, whatever. That feeling of freedom is worth everything to me. I’m old, I have few years left, and spending them lockdown is not the way I want to spend my remaining time on this earth.
I practice extreme personal responsibility with managing COVID and spreading or contracting it. It’s not about how restricted I am in my actions, but I restricted I am by the state, and what I am “allowed” to do.
It seems to me that the managerial class have taken over everything, including politics. As just one example, the situation in aged care homes (which IMHO should revert to being called nursing homes – as the name implies, the residents are there because they need nursing care) can be pointed directly to allowing the “system” to be managed by bureaucrats who have no knowledge at all of the difficulties involved in caring for old, frail, sick people.
They stopped being called nursing homes because there are no nurses in them.
Well you are probably right. But what happened was low care in hostels and high care in nursing homes were combined and n to the one establishment, now called aged care. . Those formerly in low care need care but not nursing in most cases.
The problem is there aren’t any bureaucrats keeping an eye on aged care. No one monitoring spending, level of care, quality of food and nutrition, identifying emerging issues are n and he sector, etc. I am surprised that there are no state-based outposts of the Department with a responsibility reform keeping an eye on the sector. Properly-resourced state-based offices which knew the sector would have been able to plan for Covid
Typos. Sorry! ‘Emerging issues in the sector’, and ‘responsibility for’
And it is difficult to require aged care homes to provide more staff when Howard abolished staffing ratios.
JMNO…staff ratios were only abolished in private aged care facilities, but were accepted and remain in public…or state…institutions.
That is why in Victoria, where around 10% of such facilities are in state hands, only FIVE cases of Covid 19 have been recorded there in total.
They are actually still NURSING homes, where the staff numbers and skill levels are far superior to what is found in the other 90%.
I know this because decades ago I was involved in the original research to define the level of dependency of selected residents in all types of nursing homes in Victoria. The results of this research were accepted/adopted in the public sector only.
At the very least, following the Covid19 disaster, these findings would indicate that the same standards should be mandated in ALL aged care institutions on a nation-wide basis.
Yes, I know they kept the ratios in State-run homes but there are not many of them. My experience of aged care was with my parents who sequentially were in a low care not-for-profit hostel (degrees of dementia but not in need of nursing care), and before the rot set in
The trouble is, in normal times, society can easily cope with a low level of law- breaking. But with a pandemic, a tiny number of infractions can spread to massive numbers and overwhelm the system.
I don’t expect carpentry advice from a plumber nor vice versa but philosophy from a lawyer is farcical.
The tragedy of the commons is not that we are not social beings in general but that the sociopath can, and will, ALWAYS, wreak havoc because they lack this communal sense.
Every parent knows when they have a wrong’un but few have the steel to do something about it.
Often they will deny & defend these miscreants even as they destroy the family.
In small societies they are easily dealt with – by sanction, exile or execution – but beyond a fairly limited group size they can be devastating.
In modern society they tend to become politicians or merchants.
However there is another sub group, without whom they would not be able to do so much damage – the enablers, the toadies & Jobsworths who, lacking ability or ethics, go where they perceive advantage, usually to spite those whom they resent for being better people.
There is no faith. There is no belief . . . for there is no political leadership willing to incorporate accountability, transparency and/or accessibility.
And there is no imagination or, as Bush Mk1 called it, the vision thing.