The simplest proposition one could put about the last few months of the COVID crisis would be this:
One, the federal government failed to create a rapid and comprehensive vaccination plan when it was clear that this was the only thing that would get us clear of this thing.
Two, we remain thus, perpetually on the edge of lockdown, and will be for some time.
Three, the situation is clearly and absolutely the federal government’s fault. I state the bleeding obvious here, because what should follow that undeniable sequence hasn’t: a widespread, multi-partisan, deep-running anger at the federal government.
Yes, I know they’ve taken a hit in the polls. But it’s a 53-47 sort of hit, not even close to a repudiation of the government itself. Even if you responded that that is a judgement on the opposition, not the government, well, where’s the anger, the basic first order reaction? I mean I’m not asking this rhetorically, or in some feeble attempt to rouse people to action. I really mean, what could possibly be the reason why there hasn’t been some sort of unitary anger at this failure?
I know that the above verges on the bleeding obvious, but sometimes a restatement of the most basic facts is a necessary thing. This is not a question about voter apathy on “important matters”, which usually turn out to be matters of structural governance far beyond the comprehension of many. This is the prospect of a year or more — more — of being locked down every time more than half-a-dozen cases arise in any given location.
It’s the prospect of being far less prepared — not only for the Delta variant, with its evolved capacity to get around our pre-vaccine measures, but the prospect of the sigma, tau, rho, epsilon and alpha alpha variants (we’re already up to lambda), which will have their own special tricks.
These are our lives we’re talking about, and lockdown is a temporary form of what’s called “bare life”, the notion that the state can just flick the switch and turn the full life of citizenship into the mere life of living on. True, there is something karmic about it happening to Australia. We’ve pioneered the use of bare life as a form of existential torture, and now we have had to turn it on ourselves. Far lighter in many ways, but the essence of such torture is that the only thing to do with the wasted time of your life is to contemplate the wasting time as it wastes.
So why aren’t a large number of people at a pitch of anger about this vast failure, this wholly unnecessary futility? Why instead are the only active protesters the ones who specifically reject the means by which their freedom — both liberty and freedom from harm — could be achieved, preferring a fantasy notion of a society of “pre-scientific” bodies, bounded, separate and uninvolved?
The acceptance of pre-vaccine lockdowns was simple, rational stoicism. One could question specific measures (was an 8pm curfew really necessary, or just policing?) while committing to the whole. The lockdowns now — one can feel their pure superfluity, in absolute terms. There is a clear cause and effect relationship between the government’s failure and our plight. Politics involves the mass act of connecting cause to effect and taking action accordingly. Why isn’t it happening?
The abstract separation of cause and effect could be one explanation offered. This isn’t like being locked out of a workplace or seeing the cops beat someone up. There’s vaccines, there’s not vaccines; there’s lockdowns, they all happen separately. But then, classes and parties have always been able to make that connection.
Reading a bit more into the 1961 credit squeeze for last week’s Megalogenis review, one is struck by the steady build of the reaction, from the point at which interest rates start to climb, and there is a realisation that the government has stuffed it up — and done so through a mix of ham-fisted incompetence and lack of care. The reaction builds all the way to the election and the Coalition survives by the barest whisper.
But that simple cause-effect relation underpinning politics appears to cease at some point. If I had to guess a moment when it happens in Australia I’d have to say either the 2007 sacking of the Howard government, overwhelmingly for imposing WorkChoices; or, as a lesser final moment, of Rudd-Gillard in 2013, for the imposition of a carbon tax that had, arguably, not been flagged in the 2010 campaign.
But the 2013 moment is far more provisional than the 2007 moment. And after 2013, it really starts to go kablooey across the world. The rolling PMs in Australia, Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK. Demonstrative politics in one way, utterly symbolic in another. Is this an era in which mediation has become so layered that the practice of linking cause and effect, as politics, is buried?
Does a mass anger and protest not emerge because the Labor opposition has not made the case? Were the mainstream newspapers and TV news to have a full front page/first story labelling the vaccine rollout “a failure, a disgrace and a betrayal”, would Labor have then taken that line? But of course we now have a 100% right-wing, large-scale private media. So that would only happen against Labor.
This surely represents a new degree of the disconnect between politics and society, and the further atomisation of the latter. Is this something COVID has done, with its socially atomising effects?
Or is COVID the first major event to have occurred in a time when events themselves have ceased to be understood as such?
The conclusion I keep coming to, is this ^^^^
I asked myself the same question, Guy, but you answered it yourself, for the most part, in your third to last paragraph: The media would have destroyed Labor – hounded it from office by now – had this happened under their watch. I mean Labor politicians were virtually hung from the nearest tree in 2010 because they took Treasury’s advice and built school halls to keep the economy going in the face of the after-shock of the GFC. A couple of cost over-runs were blown up into Khemlani-style boondoggles. And now every school in the country has facilities they wouldn’t have dreamt over before 2008.
In this instance, an utterly unnecessary balls-up – the government playing politics with vaccines – has led to continuing lockdowns that are destroying businesses and robbing people of their livelihoods. The dearth of vaccines and lousy government communication has left hundreds of people dead. Quarantine facilities are still non-existent. Aged care workers are still most unvaccinated. Thousands of Australians remain stranded overseas, cut off from their loved ones.
And what do the polls show? 53-47….maybe. In the meantime, Barnaby f&*^ing Joyce is the deputy prime minister again and the Leader of the House is another man facing untested rape allegations. The government is not even trying to cover up outright corruption. The economy is falling into a heap. We’ve unnecessarily alienated our biggest trading partner. And we are now the world’s biggest pariah on climate change.
I’m with you. I don’t understand why people aren’t marching on Canberra with pitchforks (masked and socially distanced, of course). The level of anger I feel I am sure is shared by many, many others. Have we just become inured to incompetence and corruption. One is left thinking ‘what would it actually take’ for the population to take up arms against this rabble??
The” Beetrooter” what a great name for “it”. Yuk can you imagine…..blerh. Gawd.It is absurd. But do an ICAC. scrutinise water contracts make sure the federal courts get some oversight and open up the HC to new blood
Well, we are a nation where public anger has never really caught on in the way it has elsewhere, but I think the specific failure of the Morrison Government to generate the anger it ought to have is because there is no credible public figure modelling (or incarnating) that anger. In the case of the State Labor leaders their restraint is wise, because the unpolitical mass who need to be persuaded see governments in an amalgam which ought to be working together, and they should. In the case of the Federal ALP, they just can’t do it, for a variety of reasons. But as you say yourself, Guy, Tony Abbott, who channeled, indeed generated public anger over utterly manufactured crises and betrayals had the huge megaphone of the Murdoch at his disposal. And the streets are not available for this cause either – the Left is obediently social distancing, as they should. What anger there is is private, simmering anger.
Media framing, as hinted by Guy near the end, seems to me to be everything here. No Labor Government could get away with what has happened because the ‘100% right-wing, large-scale private media’ mentioned near the end would create a narrative of political crisis to accompany the health crisis. There are interesting comparisons to be made with the sense of political crisis and decay dramatised by media in 1975 and 2013 against Labor governments. There is absolutely nothing like that going on at present in the media. What we have instead is the health crisis and the government balls-up but no sense of political crisis to go with it. 1961 was an aberration because Fairfax almost inexplicably decided to support Calwell. The normal course of events is precisely what we’re seeing now: media companies running protection for conservative governments.
I agree. I do think that the media has a lot to answer for. No shock- horror headlines every day like that about the school halls, the insulation program, the ‘Julia Gillard carbon-tax-broken-promise’, the doomsday alarmism every day about how the mining tax was going to kill mining stone-dead with every tin-pot would-be chancer mining company given the opportunity to have a moan. Now, criticism of Government rorts is covered, but in muted reportage, not in the same tones of moral outrage. And this outrage did have an impact on people.
Is it any coincidence that this is happening in countries dominated by the Murdoch media -US, UK, and Oz? Not so NZ or Canada – of the Anglophone countries.
And the ABC has been neutered.
The ABC is a part of the problem, I want my $1 a day, or whatever it is back!
They should be defunded.
They should be funded properly and the charter of independence respected.
Their charter
“independence” , yeah right, I think they all went to university together and studied under the same trans gender ,feminist, indigenous rights, critical theory tutor. Then they all moved to the inner suburbs and got the hate on for anybody not like them.
I suspect you have not the slightest clue what they’re teaching in universities these days… or any day in the past 40 years.
Ditto
To be an effective propagandist – instead of a joke- you need to change the cliches, tropes, memes and boiler plate at least once a year.
Try putting a reminder on your underwear.
what on earth are you on about?
And Koch AtlasNetwork think tanks e.g. IPA, CIS etc. in Oz and IEA, etc. in UK; Koch climate science denial Networks have been linked by DeSmog UK in creating Covid19 science scepticism too.
Yes, Frank, it’s both gross and subtle at the same time. During Rudd-Gillard-Rudd, Murdoch rags had many articles writing: ‘in another embarrassing bungle for the Labor government’, effectively joining individual events into a narrative of incompetence. Now, while the individual events may be mentioned, they’re not linked to the words ‘Liberal’ or ‘Coalition’, and certainly not stitched together to create a narrative of incompetence. Very clever.
I can’t see media companies running protection for conservative governments.
I read Crikey, Fairfax, Guardian and a few independents. I don’t read The Australian or Herald Sun, etc.
In none of these do I see conservative protection, in actual fact what I generally observe is a pile-on hatred of the LNP and Scott Morrison in the comments section. I literally see the term “Scotty From Marketing” (or such like) 100 times a day, easy.
I’m not doubting your historical references, but I’m having trouble agreeing with your point, in fact, I’m observing the exact opposite.
Try changing your IPA goggles.
I prefer a Pale Ale but I will have IPA if its a west coast or New England variety.
Agree MSM acknowledge the billions thrown companies which made enormous profits through 20/21 siphoned through Jobkeeper and treat it as a minor aberration- ALP would have been hung drawn
And quartered if they did same!
There is plenty of anger, but as reasonable quiet voters do you know what we are doing? It’s unprecedented in Australian political history and needs to be reported on. Noticed it yet – it is the “Voices of” movement – there are over 30 grassroots political engagement groups in Australia at the moment. Join one and make the change and political history.Voices of Berowra, Voices of Bradfield, Voices of Calare, Voices 4 Cowper, Voices for Wollongong, We are Hughes, Voices of Hume, Voices 4 Lyne, Voices of Mackellar, Voices of New England, Voices of North Sydney, Voices4Riverina, Voices of Warringah, Voices of Wentworth – 14 in New South Wales. Voices for Cooper, Voices of Mornington Peninsula, Voices of Goldstein, Voices for Indi, Voices of Kooyong, Voices 4 Mallee, Voices for Monash, Voices for Nicholls, Voices of Wannon – all in VIC Voices of Durack, We are Fadden, Voices of Forrest, Voices of Groom, Voices4GC, Voices for Moore, Voices of Pearce, Voices of Wide Bay Just look at who grassroots movements are trying to replace. Porter, Dutton, Hunt, Kelly, Taylor, Fletcher, Flint, Robert, Frydenberg, Joyce, Tehan, Sharma THAT IS HOW WE ARE SHOWING OUR ANGER by voting them out.
Great comment, and everyone here should turn off their computers and get behind their Indy candidates in the material political world.
Fat chance.
The Net is the digital equivalent of an iron lung, pace maker and dialysis in your pocket.
Really! Without your computer you wouldn’t be reading this, there’s no printed version I know of, How would independent candidates even get their message out these days.
Rent a hall, put up posters and engage with… what’s the word, local voters!
Actual people, not an amorphous blob of net denizens.
Spot on.
True, i did mean it symbolically…ie less energy and passion and time aimed at frustrating, impotent, echo-chamber discussions here, more door-knocking, rallying and campaigning where it can effect change.
Some of us have lived our entire political lives being told endlessly by professional ‘opinion havers’ how sh*t our politics is, how sh*t our politicians are, how sh*t Australian voters are, how…futile and hopeless and sh*t it all is. By people who by and large I might add have lived fantastic, engaged, interesting, privileged and rewarding political lifetimes.
I’m just sick of it. Sick of unelected, unaccountable mouthpieces going ‘blah blah blah’ about politics. Most of us voters are actually pretty optimistic and generally fairly positive about the politicians we do engage with.
The media? The professional opinion motormouths who have lucratively inserted themselves between voters and elected? Personally I wish every last one of them would shut up and f*ck off. Would give the rest of us a chance to democratically breath.
Go out and engage in real material politics. Get out of the hateful little echo-chambers of the terminally impotent, the lifelong frustrated watchers.
It’s teeming with optimism, positivity and goodwill out there. Life is too short to spend it wailing about how sh*t everything is.
Hooray. I’ve been waiting for this to be mentioned. And it’s not just anger being shown but hope and optimism. Stop moaning and get out there and do something.