The bitter lesson is that what’s essential to community survival can and should be collectively guaranteed by the government
Much like toilet paper, these days hope is in short supply.
For adults, the last place left to gather in Australia turns out to be the footpath outside Centrelink. The photos and videos appeared online this morning, of queues wrapped around entire blocks.
It requires inhuman levels of optimism to call these people “jobseekers”. Only in the rarest pockets of the economy are there any jobs left to get.
The economic asteroid named coronavirus has hit Australia. Amid increasing lockdowns and quarantines, the capacity of people to earn or spend money shrinks further every day. Most shops are closed, most services have ceased. Supply chains are fraying. Production has crumbled.For adults, the last place left to gather in Australia turns out to be the footpath outside Centrelink. The photos and videos appeared online this morning, of queues wrapped around entire blocks.
It requires inhuman levels of optimism to call these people “jobseekers”. Only in the rarest pockets of the economy are there any jobs left to get.
The two Australias of our polarised job market are now playing themselves out in people’s living rooms. It’s one thing to be trapped at home, trying to work while you wrangle kids, pets and an “office” made out of a laptop on a card table. It’s another to be stuck within the same four walls with your terror of the virus, a dwindling supply of toilet paper and a procession of text messages informing you there will be no more gigs, no more shifts, no more money.
Hope remains a survival instinct in these circumstances, but clinging to belief in sudden miracle cures is not rational. It is similarly as wilful and as dotty to believe that the “neoliberal” ideological framework that has informed economic decision-making for 40 years can provide remedy to the crisis. Across the world, decades have been spent privatising government entities and services. Neoliberal policies of outsourcing, casualisation, cost-cutting and “trickle down” corporate favouritism define the Morrison Liberal/National government. But these denuded systems have now failed us and we are living in that failure; the pandemic has crashed into weakened healthcare, welfare, public housing, education, public order, aged care, childcare, manufacturing, distribution and exchange mechanisms that cannot bear its pressure. Years of sacking public servants has left national decision-making to the care not of a broad base of independent experts, but a handpicked skeleton crew of preferred ideologues.
"We need government systems that can provide enough hospital beds, enough doctors, electricians, and childcare"
It is unsurprising that the coronavirus response has been indecisive, inexpert, delayed, confusing and chaotic. Today, the CPSU condemned the government for failing to “anticipate the pressure” placed on their staff and the queues of new clients in the crisis. Worth noting is that since the election of the Liberal/Nationals in 2013, the number of Department of Human Services staff have been reduced from 32,943 to 28,081. That’s a cut of nearly 5,000 jobs. 14% of the agency.
Meanwhile, as the queues build, the Morrison government is still directing “stimulus” spending towards the corporate corners of the economy that are not actually engaged in the direct support of Australians through the crisis. To believe that private businesses will suddenly redirect their entire rationale from money-making into selfless acts of collective public service to cope with catastrophe is at best a determined misreading of capitalism. At worst, it’s crisis favouritism and in times like this it’s not only wasteful, it is dangerous.
Are we doomed? We can’t lie to ourselves; yes, when the virus hits – really hits – some of us – any of us – will suffer terribly, and needlessly. Some will die.
But if there’s hope to cling to, it’s based in the universal realisation of Australian households that a transformation of our economic system is imperative to our reconstruction, and survival. It was the same realisation that built the better, fairer, more resilient Keynesian systems of regulated, socialised welfare-state economies in the wake of the Depression and the second world war. It’s a fact forgotten by too many that the author of Britain’s transformational post-war “Beveridge Report” blueprint for the welfare state was “no socialist”. Beveridge was a Liberal who surveyed the wreckage of the British nation and deduced that taking “healthcare and pension costs away from corporations and individuals and giving them to the government would increase the competitiveness of British industry … producing healthier, wealthier, more motivated and productive workers.”
There are few left alive among us in Australia who remember just how brutal the deprivations of our Depression were. Then, as now, government chaos and inaction matched a belief in maintaining economic systems as they were while circumstances far outpaced them, and unemployment in this country hit 30% – a rate, during the crisis, that was second only to that of tragic Germany. The Curtin Labor government realised from the demands of the second world war that government-led full employment was not only possible beyond a present crisis, but provided the best social inoculation against future crisis.
Coronavirus has demonstrated – with shocking rapidity – that history has not ended. Beyond coronavirus, more crises for humanity lay ahead – especially in an unpredictable future beset by climate change.
From the supermarket to the dole queue, across a burning summer to a quarantined autumn, the repeated, bitter lesson is that what’s essential to community survival can, must and should be collectively guaranteed by the state – from ensuring fair distribution of essential goods, to providing quality NBN. We need government to maintain a resilient industrial capacity to manufacture medical equipment, firetrucks or hospitals, or shelters, or rebuild fire-ravaged towns. We need government systems that can provide enough hospital beds, enough doctors, electricians and childcare. And it’s government that has to create spaces and conditions for those now, clearly, indispensable workers – from cleaners to shelf-stackers to arts-makers, entertainers and journalists – to be paid enough to survive when a market that thinks only of profit is unwilling to front up with the cash.
Hope in the time of corona lies in rebuilding the role of government, supporting the institutions that support people and dispensing with the proven lunacy that insists fattening corporations and “the market” delivers “healthier, wealthier, more motivated and productive workers”.
Because it doesn’t. As the times reveal; it never did.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
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