Robert_Hart
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On the road to recovery?
🕑 Added 2020-04-25 22:33:24 +0000 UTCHere in Australia, there is a feeling that we are, perhaps, past the worst of the pandemic. The number of new cases has been falling for days and the deaths are now in single digits each day. As we look around the world, it is clear that, compared to many similar countries, we have passed relatively unscathed (fewer than 7,000 cases and about 80 deaths, so far) through this first infection wave, in part through the luck of being an island nation. But the experts are reminding us that there could so easily be a second wave and they point to the problems Singapore is facing. With care, Australia is capable of avoiding a second wave as, sometime in the next few weeks with strong tracking and tracing in place, we slowly relax the lockdown, piece by careful piece. But there is no real end in sight until one of the seventy or so vaccines under development is deployed – if even one reaches that stage.
As dawn broke yesterday, we Australians – residents in my street and people across the country – assembled in their driveways before 6 am, holding candles. At 6 am, we heard the notes of a distant Last Post float across the still air: ANZAC day, our most important memorial of those that have died in conflict. It dates back to 25th April 1915 when the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (hence ANZAC) rushed ashore on the beach of what is now called ANZAC cove, playing their part in the debacle that was the Gallipoli campaign. It is an interesting commentary on this country that one of the founding myths of our nation is of a military defeat and retreat.
Today is particularly poignant as we obey the social distancing required by the pandemic: there was no Dawn Service, there will be no parade by the bemedalled veterans, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren through flag-waving crowds followed by “Two Up” and beers, no gathering of peripatetic Australian youth in ANZAC cove itself or on the battlefields of France. But this year we are also remembering the deaths occurring from the pandemic and saluting the sacrifice of those around the world on the front line of the current campaign – not just the doctors, nurses and care workers, but all the essential workers needed to keep our society working, even at this very constrained level, who in their service risk infection, unlike we who can shelter in place.
Perhaps this unusual stillness provides us with a chance to think about the sort of society we should rebuild on the other side. Wound into the ANZAC myth is the veneration of mateship born in the trenches of Gallipoli and France – a belief in supporting and standing by your mates, along with a disdain for rank and privilege. According to my grandfather who (unlike his brother) survived four years in the British army on the western front, Australian soldiers were renowned for their larrikin ways and refusal to salute. This mateship created in Australia a yearning for ‘a fair go’, for an egalitarian society where what you do matters more than who you are, although the recent decades of neo-liberal ‘the-individual-is-all’ social philosophy have tried to drown that yearning in increasingly feverish consumerism where the economy is all that matters.
But now, in the unusual stillness of an ANZAC day, there is time to think. In this emergency, we are discovering that it is not the bank and industry CEOs, celebrities, social influencers, politicians, the self-inflated shock jocks and their ilk that matter; it is the doctors, nurses, cleaners, scientists, shelf-stackers, check out operators, delivery drivers, rubbish collectors, posties, paramedics and police that are keeping us safe at some risk to themselves – many of them seriously undervalued until now. We are also seeing the injustice inherent in a hugely casualised workforce, over a million of whom are, by fiat of the government, relegated to lesser government financial support or no support at all as are the temporary visa workers originally brought in to support our economy who, like the foreign students, have been bluntly told to go home – when there are no flights.
In this quiet pause, we should be asking what we want to build on the other side. Do we want to rebuild a society of increasing inequality and injustice or do we want something kinder, gentler, more people-centric? A country where the clean air we are enjoying as a result of the shutdown persists? A country where we can once again trust our government to serve all the people rather than the interests of a few?
For all its horror, this pandemic presents a tremendous opportunity to reset our society. It is to be hoped that it will be a long, long time before something akin to this pandemic creates a similar societal shock.
We have a generational duty not to waste this opportunity.
