Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Dire warnings of momentous consequences if issues aren't addressed are part of the every day business of politics.
Whether it's the opposition sparring at the government of the day about issues that it is not confronting, or third parties releasing reports highlighting looming problems in one policy area or another, projections of what will happen without action are a staple of our media diet.
It is part of the process of trying to set the agenda – and expectations – for what we talk about as a country.
Conspicuous examples: the country will become so bogged in debt it won't be able to function; the hospital system will collapse without an urgent injection of extra funding; or the climate will deteriorate alarmingly to a point where we face persistent natural disasters.
Then there are the international trends which are beyond our capacity to control but loom in our consciousness, whether that be terrorism or the rise of China.
While 2022 has been marked by many more conspicuous changes, including a new government, it also feels like this has been the year when so many of these dire predictions haven't just come true but have become the almost mundane day-to-day backdrop against which politics is conducted.
The future is now.
That has implications for what is demanded of governments, but also about how politics works.
COVID transformed ideas about what governments can afford
Two years ago we were dealing with the frontal shock of a global pandemic. We all wanted to know everything about it and, what's more, what governments were going to do about it
As 2022 staggers to its close, COVID may not be the same mortal threat it was in 2020 but we have become resigned to it continuing to cut a swathe through our day to day lives, and much more ambivalent about what governments should, or even can do about it.
The pandemic has also left governments at all levels burdened with debts which would have been deemed both unimaginable and politically unacceptable a couple of years ago.
But here we are. It is just what it is.
It transforms the discussion about what governments can afford to do, but conversely also sets new parameters for what is acceptable as an investment now to transform the future.
COVID has made many forms of government intervention more acceptable after 40 years of discussion about deregulation and small government.
The pandemic has also seen years of brawling between the federal and state governments about hospital funding and, for that matter, funding of Medicare and general practice, transformed this year into a very real crisis — exacerbated by closed borders and labour shortages — which leaves the health system reeling from a lack of availability of GPs and other health professionals.
Forecasts that the labour demands of the care economy would dwarf all others in futures have been replaced by the real time vulnerabilities in our aged care and child care systems – linked not just to the shortages and stresses created by COVID but to low wages.
Fixing these things is not just a matter of aiming to make things better in the future, but about making them capable of functioning now.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme is confronting the same staff and systemic shortages as other parts of the care economy.
The environment has experienced the future
Nowhere is the "future is now" phenomenon more conspicuous than it is in the climate change space.
It was only a decade ago that politicians were making grim warnings about rising sea levels, more regular natural disasters, and the economic implications these things would have.
But it seemed this was something that might happen mid-century at worst. The debate was about acting to try to head these things off.
In 2020, we suffered catastrophic natural disasters, none more so than the bushfires which burnt so much of Australia that year.
In 2022, it was incessant floods which rapidly made a farce of all the "once in a thousand year" comparisons.
The difference between 2020 and 2022 was that natural disasters had become a regular event, not things we regarded as unprecedented or one-off shocks.
Such changes produce their own knock-on effects to the way is politics is conducted.
A simple example: where there would have once been a political blame game questioning how a particular government had dealt with a particular disaster, the question now has become how prepared governments and institutions are for the next disaster and for a time of rolling disasters.
We are discussing the best way to have resources permanently available and ready to respond to whatever the latest disaster may be.
The infrastructure debate morphs from one that is about upgrading roads and networks to one about replacing infrastructure that has been washed away.
Governments are confronting difficult choices – and debates about their role – in having to move flood and fire prone communities.
Climate change has become real – and those who contest it seem to have gone quiet. Or at least quietened down.
Hotly contested debates about insufficient emissions reduction targets seem so 2021. The targets might still be important but the sense of urgency about transforming our energy system has become the real focus of attention, exacerbated by a global energy crisis linked to the war in Ukraine.
Not even koalas escaped the bad news cycle
Recalibrating the story, and the sense of urgency, still seems to have a way to go.
Predictions that koalas will be extinct in 30 years still somehow seem as unbelievable as the predictions of rolling natural disaster did previously.
Calls for a halt to habitat clearing still sound like something that doesn't affect the majority of people's lives, but is something that happens somewhere else.
This change to immediacy and now has implications for everyone, not just governments, or the way politics is conducted.
The media's focus and language changes too. How do you keep telling stories about another flood, another fire, another storm?
The issue isn't whether this was the worst one we had ever seen, it just becomes a matter of telling people's stories: whether that be their experience of the disaster or their experience of trying to rebuild their lives
Faced with an ongoing COVID pandemic, it feels the media has trouble working out exactly what the story is day to day.
This is all going to require a change not just in the subject matter of politics, but in the way our levels of government work together.
Natural disasters are just the most obvious example of how federal, state — and local – governments will have to work together on an ongoing basis in a way, and in areas, that they haven't had to traverse in the past.
It may have been a terrible year in so many ways. But how our politicians are transformed by it will be one of the most interesting questions for 2023.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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