The battered technocrats, the maligned experts, have hoisted themselves off the mat to exert their influence. At least so far
Let’s start with what Malcolm Turnbull might call a penetrating glimpse of the obvious. The coronavirus pandemic looms as a global test.
This illness will test the efficacy of health systems and the competence of governments, their medical advisers, and major institutions. It will also test the civic responsibility of human populations.
This pandemic is a test for facts and evidence. The challenge of coronavirus has arrived in a post-truth age, and I suspect we are going to discover over the coming weeks and months whether experts and evidence still possess the gravitational force to anchor important conversations – or whether allegiance to tribe, coupled with the ceaseless noise of our hyper-connected societies, ultimately supplants truth.
McKay Coppins, who writes perceptively about American politics for the Atlantic, noted this week Donald Trump seemed determined, from the moment the virus reached the United States, “to construct an alternate reality around the outbreak”.
The Coppins piece was published before the Oval Office madness of Thursday, when Trump sent global markets tumbling when he seemed to blame the European Union for spreading a “foreign disease”, but that doesn’t matter, because Thursday’s behaviour is part of a continuum. The core of the Trump insurgency is weaponising mass distraction.This illness will test the efficacy of health systems and the competence of governments, their medical advisers, and major institutions. It will also test the civic responsibility of human populations.
This pandemic is a test for facts and evidence. The challenge of coronavirus has arrived in a post-truth age, and I suspect we are going to discover over the coming weeks and months whether experts and evidence still possess the gravitational force to anchor important conversations – or whether allegiance to tribe, coupled with the ceaseless noise of our hyper-connected societies, ultimately supplants truth.
McKay Coppins, who writes perceptively about American politics for the Atlantic, noted this week Donald Trump seemed determined, from the moment the virus reached the United States, “to construct an alternate reality around the outbreak”.
Deconstructing Trump in this way is not a new insight. Steve Bannon, once chief strategist for Trump, called this core methodology “flooding the zone with shit”.
David Roberts at Vox has been arguing since 2017 that America is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, “a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know – what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening”. Roberts says American conservatives have triggered this rupture by rejecting the institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge, from scientists to journalists.
The new question Coppins posed was whether Trump’s methodology of sowing strategic doubt would continue to be a winner for him once his inveterate myth-making intersects with a rapidly escalating pandemic within his own borders.
During a pandemic, people get ill, people die, essential services get disrupted, and the economy wobbles. People suffer if their leaders are feckless or amoral. Perhaps more in hope than in certainty, Coppins wondered whether flooding the zone with shit, and being seen to do that, works when “the dangers are more tangible and immediate to voters, regardless of whether they support Trump”.
Implicit in this musing is a big question: will coronavirus trigger an inflection point when alternative reality, the currency of modern day demagogues, finally implodes in the face of lived reality, allowing the whole system to reset itself?
I reckon it’s the right question to ask, but I don’t know the answer, and to borrow from Lana Del Ray, hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have.
Let’s bail out of the insanity of the Trumpiverse and come home now. I said this week, after Scott Morrison unveiled his $17bn stimulus package, that evidence and expertise has staged something of a comeback. The battered technocrats, the maligned experts in Australia’s bureaucratic and political class, have hoisted themselves off the mat and appear to be exerting some influence.
Consider just one example. It is truly remarkable that in the space of a week, two at most, the Coalition executed a complete about-face on stimulus. You could easily miss it in the noise, but the Morrison government has now signed up to methods of pump-priming the economy that Liberals have spent more than a decade pillorying.
One senses Morrison’s hard-wired political pragmatism and the steady hand of Treasury in this gear shift (government people report the new secretary, Steven Kennedy, has been a source of rapid and reliable advice) but this must be beyond galling for Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan, who copped the decade-long blast for doing a version of what Morrison announced this week.
Lest I sound inexplicably upbeat this weekend, let me be clear. I haven’t fallen into a rapture about sanity suddenly resuming transmission in Canberra after a dispiriting interregnum.
We are a long way from that.
When it comes to the government’s management of the coronavirus, I have a bunch of practical questions. Is this stimulus large enough? Will it be rolled out quickly enough? Will people spend their handouts?
On the health side: was Morrison too slow on mass gatherings, and has this lack of urgency posed unacceptable public health risks? (Plenty of serious experts with medical training seem to think so, although the prime minister seems to be following the advice of his own highly reputable experts).
There was also one of those silly and counterproductive episodes that, in the age of rolling instant referendums, snowball, and become emblematic. There was the parable of the football match.
At the Council of Australian Governments meeting on Friday, Morrison pointed to the imminent necessity of cancelling large gatherings while saying in the same breath that he intended to go to an NRL game on Saturday night to watch his “beloved Sharkies” – plans he had to walk back once Peter Dutton revealed he had become infected with coronavirus.
It would have been better for Morrison to pull out on Friday afternoon to be consistent with where his own health advice was trending. But instead of ejecting elegantly, through a prism of considered leadership, there was an inelegant dismount late in the evening, and a mildly churlish statement from the office saying the prime minister had cancelled because of the “potential for the prime minister’s attendance to be misrepresented”. It wasn’t really clear by whom.
Related to this: I get that pandemics are fast moving, and complex to manage, but why is the messaging sometimes clear and sometimes confusing and seemingly contradictory, and could somebody perhaps fine tune that?
I suspect it might be better if the government started mapping out where things are likely to head to help prepare people for what’s just over the horizon, because as it stands now, some days it looks like advice is no sooner given than it is overtaken by new advice. Recent days have demonstrated messaging can be both clear and confounding, particularly in rapidly changing conditions. Also: where is the necessary public education campaign? That really does seem urgent.
So it should be clear that I am not saying the government delivered a stimulus package that wasn’t stupid, so everything is OK now. The only observation I’m making is the official coronavirus-related conversations in Australia are certainly contested, but they are occurring within the boundaries of expert advice, and what you might term shared reality. At least so far.
I really welcome that. We all should welcome that.
Unfortunately, a number of other conversations in daily political life under this government remain stubbornly outside that frame, and that general tendency undermines Morrison’s current efforts to project as a prime minister whose information can be trusted.
Climate change is the obvious one. Can anyone tell me why Morrison can be counselled by experts with scientific training in managing a pandemic – and be seen to be doing that – yet ignore equally valid expert advice about another existential risk? I’d really love to know.
The other obvious one is the sports grants fiasco. Morrison is point-blank refusing to engage with evidence that shows his office was a hands-on decision maker in at least one of the adjudications about sports grants, which runs counter to the narrative he’s constructed where Bridget McKenzie was the decision maker.
Morrison is also stepping around the central unresolved question about whether his government acted lawfully in allocating these grants. The prime minister steps around this inconvenience by either declining to take questions, or taking the questions and then declining to answer them.
Given this is all pretty depressing, let me leave you with one cheery thought.
The optimist in me says this week’s stimulus about-face example demonstrates that this government can turn on the head of a dime; that the opposite can also be true, if the time has come for the opposite to also be true.
Think of it this way. If the Coalition can spend a decade defaming Labor for the crime of stimulating the economy to ward off a recession, and then follow Labor’s playbook during a close encounter with an economic crisis on their own watch – then anything can happen.
Anything, truly. A serious shift on climate change. True confessions on sports grants. Both unlikely, but in high octane times such as these, it’s best never to leave your desk.
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