It’s not lockdowns. It’s not specific state governments or federal. It’s no one individual or institution. It’s a collapse of accountability across the political spectrum and it is accelerating. Examples are everywhere:
- The PM declares he will make an untested vaccine mandatory at risk to life and limb of every Australian.
- Premiers stuff up quarantines at the cost of tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of lives.
- Other state governments close borders only to ignore their own citizens in favour of infected foreign students.
- $60bn budget blunders pass without incident.
- Enormous economic plans and reform notions are announced only to collapse within hours.
- Stimulus convulses from mad optimism to disgorged billions like a crazed metronome.
- Fiscal rains randomly, deluging some while others die of drought without rhyme or reason.
- The central bank has failed utterly to meet its charter and huddles in fear in its fortress of solitude.
- Both halves of the houses and holes economy are exhausted. Yet no thought is given to what comes after.
- Foreign policy bipartisanship has collapsed into greed and bribery from foreign powers.
- Markets have ceased pricing risk altogether.
Governments daily say and do apocalyptically stupid stuff. Nobody is sacked. No opposition gets traction. Nobody loses power. No future is discounted.
The media has sunk into US-style binary tribalism supporting this party or that no matter what, while the national broadcaster is little more than a racist freakshow.
Nobody can protest anything because they are too afraid to go out and they probably wouldn’t anyway because they’re co-opted into the tribal groups.
Demagoguery is rife. Discussion of everything passes in moments, all outrage and no evidence. There appears to be no collective or centrist political economy normatives left against which to gauge anything. A thickening autocratic, post-truth fog blankets all.
Lobbies make policy willy nilly, bypassing any and all democratic checks and balances with an eye on nothing beyond the greed of the few one year hence.
The cradle of our future minds and value systems, universities, are unbelievably corrupted by corporatisation, foreign bribery and debased ideology. They exist no longer as repositories of history, learning and elite clear-thinking incubation. Instead they are contested sites of power and money and propaganda divorced from reason.
The liberal democratic system that was fraying coming into COVID-19 – market-based, meritocratic and democratic – has lost all meaning in the crisis. Dated political narratives fight over its torn fragments with no thought towards how to put it back together. Indeed, they are so lost that they celebrate the demise with perverse ideologies that cheerlead the end.
The intellects that once governed it are substituted by a closed loop of greedy fools without the imagination, history or values to restore it. They run gangs of kleptocrats not representative political parties or competing businesses. Access is granted only to those with the sociopathic keywords and passwords not those of community and conscience. These are Millennial cults that have neither the wit nor integrity to gauge their own rampant destructiveness. An insipid choice between Coke and Pepsi, both delivering the same broken globalisation rot gut dressed up as salve.
There was once a strong strain of stoic English pragmatism in Australians that would have meant this would sort itself out before we got too lost. Does it still exist? Perhaps but not obviously so. After three generations of socially corrosive house price worship, mass immigration and jingoistic exceptionalism what is left of it is very much open to debate.
I used to amaze at those shows on National Geographic about the inexplicable eclipse of this civilisation or that. The Ozymandius ruins of the past never made sense amid the extant force of my own culture. How did thriving metropolises disappear like rain on the mountainside?
Now it makes sense. When a political economy is overmatched by a natural disaster it does not always rebound. If it is intrinsically weak then sometimes it’s great marble facades are exposed as empty and they crumble before it. Social contracts and institutions descend into scab grab, chaos and self-interest. Leadership becomes an appeal to prejudice and narcissism. The social future that marshals effort above and beyond oneself enabling the collective system to flourish shatters and with that comes precipitous decline.
We will get through COVID-19 eventually, even if it just becomes a part of everyday life. But we are clearly and dramatically weakened by it. Or, more worryingly still, the shortcomings of our institutions are exposed by it.
Yet ahead are the much greater challenges of climate change and an expansionary Communist China that we have demonstrably failed to contain on both counts. If we are so fragile that we can’t hold to reason amid a manageable pandemic then what hope is there for those tremendous challenges. Sure, we still have public debt capacity (and not much else) but as world growth slows interminably and the great movements of flooded peoples begins, as China forcibly annexes Taiwan and the entirety of today’s commodities trade, billionaires and all, crashes into distant memory, that will disappear in a jot and we will have nothing but sand passing through our fingers.
For ten years, MB has chronicled the fall of Australian policymaking. The bedrock of this project was always our innocence that a better world for Australian children was possible and our responsibility.
Now, for the first time, I have absolutely no idea where we are going and a fading faith that we will find something better when we get there.
