It’s year three of COVID-19 induced disruption and there’s continuing uncertainty over what Australia will do next about the high rates of COVID and scores of daily deaths. But maintaining public morale and effective collective action should be major national goals.
However, there’s no unified messaging coming from the states and territories, especially as schools reopen — a key driver of increased anxiety and loss of trust in our “leaders”.
This follows the sudden shift in public health and political messages over Christmas and the new year. Virtually overnight the federal and NSW governments went from extolling the virtues of collective social action to “personal responsibility”, individual choices and “we just can’t pay for everything”.
The messaging shifted to simplistic “sunscreen” analogies (“It’s just like slip-slop-slap”), even though that was clearly at odds with what was required to reduce viral transmission. What’s less obvious is the adverse impacts on public morale when there’s a sudden shift in government focus from supporting collective and cohesive actions to individually focused or “freedom”-based choices.
What was clear throughout the first year of the pandemic was that state and federal governments had the capacity, financially and structurally, to act collectively and, most importantly, support those in need.
This included the vulnerable, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the unemployed and the homeless. They were not cast adrift on the rocks of “personal responsibility”. They were not abandoned. They were not children of a lesser god.
What is also clear is that the Australian community, unlike the divided US or other dysfunctional nations, strongly supported those actions on our behalf.
Active economic support in 2020-21 through the extended phases of JobKeeper, JobSeeker and their subsequent manifestations markedly reduced inequality and built social cohesion. They extended to providing shelter to the homeless, protecting against home evictions, and increasing health and social services for those in greatest need.
Modelling suggested they substantially reduced the risk of poorer mental health and suicidal behaviour, built public morale, and promoted the hope that a more caring nation was developing.
When it comes to the undermining of public morale, two key themes are in danger of becoming quite entrenched. One is that our governments have abandoned many of us to “sink or swim”. Those with more (health, economic and social) resources will survive but it is no longer the government’s to support those who might drown.
People can now be left to buy their healthcare — rapid antigen tests aren’t free — even when health professionals clearly indicate many are missing out. If the sense of “it’s everyone for themselves” becomes widespread, social pessimism and selfish actions will become endemic.
The second theme is the transformation of the public mood from general “anxiety” (well documented in 2020) to an admixture of fear (“Will we all get sick?”, “Will the children be hardest hit?”), fatigue and general despondency (“There is no easy way out of this”). That loss of public hope and shared optimism (“If we stick together, we can get through this”) will be devastating, particularly for children and young people.
The simplistic politicisation of right-wing “personal freedoms” and a booming jobs market versus left-wing “overreach” of government and an undue focus on counting the deaths of the vulnerable (the aged, the disabled, those with “underlying health conditions”) fails hopelessly to answer the more substantive question:, what should governments be doing beyond their preoccupation with their reelection prospects?
Top of that list should be which government actions could build public morale and sustain smart collective efforts? Linked directly is the question of which policies have the greatest capacity to deliver the most benefits to all the people? Which actions bring us together rather than promoting greater selfishness, disconnection and isolation?
Those who are most at risk have little capacity to hide behind the mask of “personal responsibility”.
As various political, social, economic and health leaders line up to deliver their respective pitches for 2022, it is timely to ask who among them will espouse those genuine human values that emphasise collective responsibility, personal accountability and a generosity of spirit that helps to build a safer and more inclusive community?
One clear lesson of the pandemic has been that a cohesive society, one that doesn’t conflict personal or ideological choices, is more likely to build public morale, engender hope and guide a path to a safer and more mentally wealthy nation.
When you have a govt that ascribes to the theory of the survival, as they interpret it, of the “fittest” and back that up with a pseudo religious belief paradigm, that also believes it is a sign of your relationship with some god that determines whether you are doomed to die or not from misfortune, then you have the recipe for the sort of break down we see occurring in public morale and for that matter, simple morals. This Govt is a Pox on the land in that regard.
It’s commonly known as eugenics and is joined at the hip with US radical right libertarian socio-economic ideology imported by think tanks.
The phenomenon that hath no name, according to the same Koch linked think tanks, media and Liberal Party, is that trust in public services has increased, for obvious reasons; this is not what they want as the PS is there to be dog whistled, defunded, then taxes/budgets cut, along with services, as ‘costs’.
My friends & I may be typical of many Australians who do not have school-age children. We venture out for essentials such as food shopping & medical appointments but that’s about the extent of it. No more dining out, travelling or holidaying, we stay home- with the exception of going for a bike ride or a walk at the beach or park.
We are careful with social distancing when in public, wear masks but are under no delusion we will procure RATs in the event we suffer symptoms of Covid.
It’s not right wing politics to aim for the collective good. That’s dirty language to that ideology. As a nation we have nothing left to be collectively proud of any more. Not even our care for the vulnerable. It seems they too have to take Personal Responsibility for their predicament.
Correct Lupeza. Remember when we used to talk about a chain only being as strong as the weakest link. The same with sports teams. I find the shift to the idolism of the individual in sports teams interesting. The concept that one player can win a game. My experience was that there are people with outstanding skills but they are dependent upon the rest of the team. Particularly in “Grand Finals” when outstanding players are still outstanding but the difference is often when the rest of the team rise to the occasion and play outstanding also.
Dare I say this from a management perspective on large projects. It is when the leaders instill in the rest of the workforce the desire of the team to perform at a higher level as opposed to the individual that greater results are achieved.
In society it is the individual versus the community. I am discussing concepts and if one contextualizes this in the form of nations it explains why China is outperforming the USA both economically and in social cohesion.
Rather than crunch down on the politics perhaps we should look behind the scenes and determine why.
When Australians vote in the next election, we need to look beyond the tactically driven election promises to ask ourselves what sort of society we want to live in, not just for us but for future generations. A society where the poor, the chronically sick or disabled and the aged are regarded as expendable should be terrifying to anyone who has any connection with any of those groups. And that surely is most of us. But this is what the Coalition offers.
So the choice is simple, whatever you think of the ALP, whatever despicable policies of Coalition governments, past and present, they have colluded with (or even introduced), whatever rorts they have visited on the electorate in the past, they cannot possibly be worse than what we have now. Vote independent, vote Greens by all means, but preference ALP ahead of the Coalition because many of us literally cannot bear to live under this government any longer.