Extract from The Guardian
When the pandemic hit, the former Labor deputy leader saw opportunities for permanent improvements, so she put together a book
It was in March, when the pandemic threw all the pieces of a predictable life up into the air, that Tanya Plibersek thought she might have a book. Before the pieces fell back down into the same old place, she wanted to pull together a vision for a better landing.
Huge changes came one after the other: “We went to remote learning for kids almost overnight, we had banks offering mortgage relief, there were rent reductions for businesses, we were housing rough sleepers in hotels, all of these things would have seemed impossible and we were doing them almost overnight. It was such a massive undertaking, that I thought, well, there’s really an opportunity here that comes from this disruption.”
She had also been reading about the way Australia reset itself after the disruptions of the second world war in Stuart McIntyre’s 2015 book Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s.
“It looks at the old cabinet papers and all sorts of really interesting source documents, and he tells the story of Australians making this enormous sacrifice coming out of the Great Depression and going almost straight into this massive war effort that involved lots of personal sacrifice … the return to the populace after that was a government that promised them full employment and higher rates of home ownership, and they set about doing that.
“And I thought, well, Australians have sacrificed so much during the pandemic ... What’s the return to our citizens for the enormous discipline and compassion and patience and goodwill that the vast majority has shown? Well, the return has to be a better country on the other side.”
Plibersek turned to an array of thinkers for contributions, among them June Oscar on resetting and reconstructing the relationship with Indigenous Australians, Tim Soutphommasane on the need for a more emphatic stance against racism, Ross Garnaut on Australia’s potential as a clean energy superpower, Ian Chubb in praise of science, Cate Blanchett and Kim Williams on the value of the arts, Wayne Swan on building society from the bottom up, Fiona Simson on sustainable farming, Sally McManus on rebuilding the economy via decent pay for all, Stephen Koukoulas on full employment, Cameron Clyne on banking post-Covid.
The final vision – Upturn: A Better Normal after Covid-19 – lays out a roadmap for progress on many fronts: economy, society, community, family. Many of the contributions are clearly Labor voices but others, says Plibersek, are not so obvious. “I wouldn’t know how they vote.”
In a certain light – one that might be filtered through resurgent speculation of ALP leadership troubles – the book could be seen as a stately manifesto of a future leader. But it’s no surprise that Plibersek says no, it’s just a discussion about Australia’s potential. She is looking forward to helping Anthony Albanese become prime minister at the next election.
‘Relaxed and confident’
A bit like Plibersek herself, the book treads a fine balance between pressing for change and not scaring the horses too much. There’s nothing that hasn’t been extensively canvassed before, but it wedges a foot in the door of possibility that was opened by the pandemic.
“I don’t think what I’m proposing in the book is frightening in any way. I talk about being relaxed and confident. I think people should be able to feel confident that they’ll have a roof over their head, that if they do the right thing they’ll still have a job next month, that their kids will be OK, that the environment will still be there when their kids grow up, for their kids and their grandkids.
“It is optimistic … some people might think it’s too idealistic.”
Not Plibersek: “No … because that’s the point isn’t it? We achieved these incredible things during the pandemic. Look at Australia compared with many similar countries just in terms of our health response. That [response] relied on institutions that we had built over generations, and part of looking to the future is protecting what we’ve built over those generations.”
Of all the issues covered in the book, what keeps Plibersek awake at night is “the lack of certainty in energy and climate change policy”.
“If you were an investor who wanted to build a huge new solar farm or a huge new wind farm or some other renewable energy project and you had a government that couldn’t make its mind up about any of this stuff, why would you do it?”
The binary proposition that the nation must choose between the environment and jobs is, she says, “absolutely not real”.
“It’s absolutely wrong for people to portray it as a fight between jobs and the environment. It’s 100% wrong and I think it’s deliberately mischievous.
“But I think you can’t expect communities that have relied on coalmining or mining generally to take that on trust, and we need to show where the jobs are, demonstrate that there are well-paid, secure jobs and we’re not replacing well-paid, secure jobs with insecure sporadic jobs.”
Starting a ‘civil conversation’
Plibersek has given a series of talks based on essays in the book, and says she has enjoyed discussing a broad range of issues, not just education, her portfolio as a shadow minister (and the subject of her own essay in the book), with a diverse audience, not just “the usual suspects”.
“At each of the talks are hundreds of people who aren’t the usual suspects, you know, Labor party branch members talking about Labor party policies. The whole idea really is to try to engage people in a discussion about what comes next, and not the same people all the time.
“This is going to seem a bit tangential but politics and democracy has become a bit fragmented at the moment. We’ve just been through this really bruising and hostile presidential election campaign in the US where people in opposing camps were shouting very loudly to the people who already agree with them, but couldn’t hear or understand each other across that divide, and I think that’s a real danger for democracy in general and for democracy in Australia, so I’m trying to start a civil conversation about where were going, that’s the purpose of the book.”
Plibersek says Australians may need some “predictability and certainty” after a discombobulating year, but they also glimpsed at the outset of the pandemic what might be, and she believes there is hunger for change in the tone of politics.
“The response that the initial national cabinet had … with people just breathing a sigh of relief, that a Liberal National federal government would talk to Liberal, National and Labor state and territory governments and just try and fix the problems that we were facing as a nation and put politics aside, with no one shouting at anybody … I feel like the country just breathed a sigh of relief when that was happening.
“I just think there is so much more room for that in our politics at the moment, just an actual courteous discussion, even if we agree about where we disagree, maybe with a bit more focus on where we agree and [then] moving forward on the areas in which we agree. What a relief that would be for people.”
Upturn: A Better Normal After Covid-19, edited by Tanya Plibersek, (NewSouth Books) is out now
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