The Australian response to the coronavirus should be, by any rational assessment, a cause for pride. We’re not a boutique little island like New Zealand. We’re a continent nation with two major global travel hubs in Melbourne and Sydney.
Had we had a fully anti-science populist prime minister — i.e. the one we will have, gifted by Murdoch, in 10 years — or a couple of premiers of the same stripe, disaster would have been possible.
Terrible mistakes have been made but then corrected. The virus has revealed gaping holes in state process with regard to such emergencies, and they’ve been responded to, in varying degrees, in real time.
If there’s any fault, it’s been in an insufficiency of response, and the failure to elaborate plans for the next, tougher virus (unless it’s being done in secret).
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So why is the right doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the notion that we are groaning under the harsh yoke of authoritarianism?
In The Australian, Paul Kelly — the governor-general of News Corp — laments the collapse of states into quasi-medieval fiefdom, and wonders why they can’t lock down but also … erm … let interstate people through, describing it as “pandemic protectionism”.
In The Age/SMH Chris “the Lizard Man” Uhlmann is back describing Victoria’s lockdown as East German in style. And the wilder shores of the right, such as, hahaha, James Bolt (yes, those Bolts) of the, hahaha, IPA, talking in Spiked of a “dystopia”.
The desperation of the right is an obvious response to the continued widespread public support for state government measures erring well on the side of caution.
That support has held up into what is now the pandemic’s six month. There’s a lot of grousing, but no actual protest, save from the growing number of Australian QAnon crazies, which is the direction in which the whole right is heading.
‘Pandering to the mob’
So the only way in which the pandemic measures can be attacked is to utterly mischaracterise them. Kelly’s cute notion of “pandemic protectionism” is lip-smacking Hawke-Keating vintage — the notion that stopping the spread of an R0>1 virus is akin to protecting Morphy Richards toasters with a tariff wall.
Uhlmann’s happy-clappy circular logic is even better. Victoria is a parliamentary democracy which empowers its leaders to make collective decisions but is akin to the restrictions placed by East Germany, a cold war dictatorship.
The inconvenient fact that the Andrews government enjoys widespread support despite its blunders? This, according to Uhlmann, is “pandering to the mob”. So you’re a dictatorship betraying the country by pandering to what people want done, viciously imposing on them what they enthusiastically support. Very rational.
How is the right getting it so wrong again and again? For anyone who’s paying attention COVID-19 has opened up the largest rift to date between its projected claim that it represents “quiet Australians” and how most Australians — and really every population — think about life and the world, and the priorities within such.
It goes to the very roots of the right’s founding philosophy and the degree to which it isn’t one — a philosophy that is. It’s an ideology, reverse-engineered to intellectually justify a given politics.
The cracked nature of the classical liberal-conservative mix, responsible for much of our inability to rationally debate the problems we face, is being made vastly visible by the COVID-19 emergency.
The right’s implicit and explicit argument is that individual freedom is the baseline of human existence, and that any limits on it, even by an elected government, is tyranny.
The sovereign individual
I’ve previously noted how this is an American import, projected on to a country which has never made it a big theme of our self-imagining.
But let’s go one stage deeper. The liberal notion of the sovereign individual, arising in the 18th century, and expressed in the US constitution, has many concrete sources — chiefly, the search for a way to justify slavery as an institution (if freedom is the right to dispose of the property of your selfhood as you wish, who’s to stop you trading it away?) — but most importantly it’s an abstraction from real life.
Little we do that really matters in our life, at the base of our life, where meaning is made, is done by acting as a sovereign individual indifferent to given connections, obligations, the welfare of those we care about etc.
We live in webs of accepted unfreedom, and it is these obligations that anchor life as a meaningful activity. On top of that, we add a degree of individual choice on selected matters.
The classical liberal fiction is that we choose our life again and again every morning — that you make a decision every evening to return to the family home. But of course you don’t. You chose the obligation some time previously and the obligation simply reproduces itself. That’s why making the choice to leave such a home really is a dramatic thing, an event.
So the real basis of life for any society has always been “protection” before “freedom”. Protection is a type of freedom. By being able to assume that others are safe, we are free to do something other than attend to the most basic security and protection ourselves.
Risk is OK — but not too much
We are only capable of being full humans — rather than scared, hypervigilant isolates focused on mere survival — when that protection is secured. We accept risk, but most societies are keen to err on the side of limiting such.
Through much of modernity, this drive to positive freedom has powered politics from the rise of social liberalism and socialism in the 1850s (Marx is a British social liberal, in the last analysis).
The intellectual rebellion against that began in Vienna in the 1920s, largely as a response to the success of social democracy.
People such as Mises and Hayek purported to be terrified of bolshevism. What really scared them was Hjalmar Branting’s increasingly popular social democracy in Sweden, founded in 1920, and the same in Austria. They feared not the failure of socialism, but its success.
From complex liberal traditions, the “classical liberals” distilled a simplistic, abstract ideal of liberty drawn from a simplistic analytic philosophy and offered it as the “true” picture of life.
Hayek noted it would take decades to get a chance to implement such a philosophy, and it was only with the political crisis of social democracy in the 1970s they got their chance.
The “negative” view of freedom (as nothing other than restraint of the state) has been able to gain mass popular support only by serving as the ideological justification for a consumer capitalism based on a decades-long bubble economy.
The right’s ideologues have become so wrapped up in the philosophy that they can no longer see outside it, or measure the degree to which it is diverging from broader social judgements.
Corporatist populism and socialism have returned as movements because that philosophy has delivered a life so precarious for so many that fully lived life becomes impossible for ever greater numbers, and “positive freedom” makes a comeback.
The COVID-19 crisis in Australia has revealed, utterly, how deep the priority of “positive freedom” over “negative freedom” runs here — and everywhere.
The lockdowns and limits here are based on a rational understanding of the need for collective measures. The proper hedge against authoritarian drift in such circumstances is not your right to screw up the attempts to prevent a virus getting out of control.
It is creating institutions and bodies that monitor the state and can ask questions of officials — consultative citizens bodies to which governments must explain their reasoning.
If one effect of COVID-19 is to hasten the discrediting of a simplistic philosophy that ran like a virus through the past decades, we will be on the way to a hard-earned immunity.
By which point, of course, the right will be comparing us to North Korea or the Death Star, or political fantasies beyond even that.
Are conservatives wrong about Australians’ support for lockdowns? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
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if there was “widespread public support for state government measures” in NSW, we would all be as doing as we’re told, and wearing masks. We’re not, there’s less and less on the street and in the shops every day. I saw more mask use back in March/April.
There is a silent rebellion going on in the streets of Sydney. People here do not believe what they are being told by their governments – we have just been given to much misleading and contradictory information… I know it’s different in Melbourne, and you have a Premier you worship and trust. Not in NSW, and our attitudes are not coming from the Right, the IPA (who?) or by reading the Australian’s columnists (who reads them anyway, apart from Guy?) The “people” are making up their own minds, and that’s giving me hope.
Got any actual statistics to support your proposition?
I suspect it is more a matter of a few “people” making up their own pig-ignorant minds, than a rational response by a majority.
But I’m in WA, where even the most ‘right wing’ of right wingers in the Liberal Party have done a 180˚ turn and are supporting the actions of the present government in this matter.
As to the IPA – you are surely pulling our collective pissers; it is they, together with their propaganda arms in the commercial media who are directing much of the dogma in the current Federal government – several Ministers, and others, are members of that misnamed mob of malfaesants.
…but the reality is – you don’t have a clue.
What possible “statistics” could I supply, Rolly? I have eyes, and my observation is that fewer and fewer people on the streets of Sydney are obeying their government and our (right wing) Premier, and putting on masks. I even bought some last week after Gladys Berejiklian, Woolies and Bunnings requested we use them, and even wore one of the annoying things for a couple of shopping trips. But I was in a tiny minority even then. Today I was in my shopping centre for about 30 minutes, and barely saw a single person with one on…
I come from the libertarian left, and came of age during the rebellious early 70s. I once that that was “the left” but Guy has now told me otherwise. To be “progressive left” now you obey instructions, follow the leader (not Gladys, apparently, or Trump, of course not), worship the Victorian government (provided it is run by Daniel Andrews) and do as you are told. And now matter how oppressive, inconsistent and incompetent (hotels quarantine), love it! Also (apparently) spend endless hours reading The Australian’s tiresome columnists (who has the time?) and then obsessing about conspiracies by shadowy figures (called the IPA, honestly, who are they?), the puppet masters (huh?) telling us what to think.
I expected something a bit more sophisticated from Crikey, and Guy…
The problem is, against your anecdotes is no widespread backlash is showing up in polling.
The libertarian left isn’t very huge, I wish it were, but we are outnumbered here and pretty much everywhere.
I hope when this is over and being against the lockdowns is not treated as a threat to public health everyone can think of a less shabby pandemic plan. We papered over a lack of things like a supply of medical grade PPE and continued lack of 24 hour testing with cops giving out fines. Surely we could have done better?
Feel free to suggest a public health crisis management plan which deals with human behaviour without enforcement being necessary. Should make for fascinating reading.
To add to Catherine’s comment, can you suggest a plan which incorporates the concepts of exponential growth, the precautionary principle and asymmetric risk?
No doubt hindsight will be a marvellous thing, in time; the problem for the neo-lib-ertarian anti-lockdown crowd is premature hindsight.
I think some of those are fair points. No adequate stockpile of PPE, allowing medical infrastructure to be sold to foreign interests who then expropriated 70 tonnes of PPE just before the pandemic hit. Stupid.
Testing efficiency is still far short of adequate – news reports are that it is still taking up to 6 days to get test results in aged care while that is the epicentre of the pandemic.
Trusted medical authorities from Fauci in the USA to our local guys talked down the use of masks for instrumental reasons in the early months – ie preserving them for medical users during the initial shortage. Then, when supplies are deemed adequate, they belatedly contradict themselves and tell people to use them. This undermined trust and has obviously contributed to the mask cf in the US.
Heavy handed use of police to enforce all manner of dubious limits is not a good substitute for informing the public and making the necessary precautions available.
@Archibald, Trusted medical authorities from Fauci in the USA to our local guys talked down the use of masks for instrumental reasons in the early months – ie preserving them for medical users during the initial shortage. Then, when supplies are deemed adequate, they belatedly contradict themselves and tell people to use them
This has been transparently obvious throughout, but the media have uncritically gone along with the Fauci (US), Whitty (UK), Murphy (Aust) lie as if we are too silly to see though them. The media toed the line. This is embarrassing and must lead thinking people wondering just how trusted these people should be.
How about the two points of failure that made the lockdown neccessary that was in the post I made? The post you allegedly replied to. Did you read it, or are you just going to strawman my argument down to expecting no coercion?
The left has always been about coercion. We want to take property away from some and give it to others. Tax some heavily and use surveillance to find their money. Etc.
Libertarian leftism in social and cultural matters was a thing when homosexuality, abortion and incrndiary books were banned. But its not being a selfish individualist is it? You obey traffic lights i presume? Take doctors’ advice, or do you interpret yr own x-rays to be ‘free’? Yr offering the cartoon idea of freedom im talking about
A very timely article, Guy, that faithfully relays the spirit among most people here in Melbourne at the moment. My concern is that your piece shows our 230 year old political language – Left and Right – is worse than irrelevant. It obscures the crisis we are in and allows the Bolts etc to get away with peddling their toxic crap. Read your piece out loud on a street corner (if only we could go out) and half the passers-by would mistake your attack on the Right as an attack on ‘enterprise’ and the small businesses you were defending the other day, or as an attack on ‘conservatism’ and a disdain for the nostalgic Bradman/Holden/surfing/digger elements of cultural life that Howard played up. The hardening Right of the current era isn’t really interested in these things except as cover for their program of self-interest, intolerance of ‘the other’ except where it can be used as an instrument for their own ends, and belief in power at almost any cost. That is ultimately toxic for all Australians whether they are wage earners, business owners, professionals, farmers, unemployed, creatives, retired, kids or anything else. You are dead right that ‘protection’ comes before freedom, and not just for the weak. As North and other institutional economists have shown, historically markets have only worked when ‘credible commitments’ were in place, through cultural bonds, treaties, contract laws etc.
It is time the language and conceptual charade of the Right and all its manipulated implications (‘liberal, freedom loving, fair, efficient, enterprising’) and the Left (‘oppressive, grey, punitive, slack, uninventive’) are thrown out of our discourse. The real-time experiment going on in Melbourne shows that 90% of us live our lives on the basis of a Social Compact to which we bring our individual commitment, skills and efforts and ask in return for protection, support, tolerance, camaraderie and the opportunity to benignly pursue our self-interest. That 90% stand against the Ego-Right who subordinate all things to their own selves. A vile fringe who have achieved increasing dominance of the mainstream media in the last 25 years.
“Ego-right”. Nice one!
We all know the ‘democratic’ ideals of the WA government. Put electronic, ankle bracelets on anyone who even looks as if they’re not following your Fuhrer’s anti Covid-19 orders. If the wearing of ankle bracelets had been dreamed up by Daniel Andrews the citizens of Melbourne would riot.
Yes, we do love our Premier, but we ain’t stupid.
There is not as much misleading and contradictory information as many claim. The advice is changing over time as the medical, epidemiological and economic data changes. So, yes, we advised to one thing one day and another next. But seen in context, this is exactly as it should be – the advisers are responsive to changing conditions.
There is still one massive unknown: the lasting effects of being infected with COVID-19. There are credible reports of lasting lung damage, kidney malfunction, heart and liver problems, chronic fatigue, and other neurological, cognitive and emotional changes. We won’t know what these long term effects really are for years. When we do know, no doubt the advice and information will change again – as well it should.
And my thanks to Guy for – once again – a stimulating, thoughtful and independent perspective.
Yes there is. The latest missive from Gladys is that community sport should be restricted. This is complete BS and simply a case of a weak premier trying to look strong the day after being humiliated by the Ruby Princess inquiry findings (not to mention Newmarch).
Why is sport being curtailed even further?
“Since the return of community sport on 1 July, we have seen an increased number of covid-19 cases in NSW.”
This is the NSW Chief Health Officer (Kerry Chant) clearly linking sport with covid transmission, which is a pack of lies.
Not one transmission in Australia has been linked to outdoors or playing sport . But your local sporting club is powerless, unlike the parasites in the alcohol and gambling industries with their big political donations and lobbyists.
If anything, sport should be allowed unrestricted while everyone works from home and the pubs are shut!
Agreed. Sport is typically played by young people. To about the age of 40 the incidence of infection is slight indeed and it is easy to provide a rough probability of becoming infected. A classic case of cluelessness from a Premier; see my post.
Agreed, also, as to the last sentence (as a basis for age alone)
There is evidence that outdoor activities are far lower risk than indoors. You simply can’t get more ventilated than immersed directly in the outside air.
However, I doubt the sort of measures that BLM took to bring the risk down to acceptable levels can be taken for all sports.
Queensland had a ban on golf, of all things, early on. Surely a more considered set of restrictions would have seen restrictions on club house use, shared facilities, sharing equipment, with people just playing a round of golf allowed?
We need to learn what worked, what didn’t work, and what was superfluous, for the inevitable next pandemic. We’ll get both better outcomes and more freedom if we do the next one smart and not on the run. It is a shame we didn’t learn what other countries experienced with SARS.
I wasn’t going to mention ‘fraud in science’ but it most certainly exists. Given capable computing power and languages such as python, R and Octave (etc.) what took months to a year to compile from the mid 1930s to the mid 1960s can be re-run (read retested) in a matter of minutes with the errors associated with manual computation eliminated.
There are a host of procedures to prevent fraud in journals but not all journals are compliant – for various reasons (staffing to funding for example) – although the more notable journals are compliant.
Reviews concerning the smoking-cancer issue are interesting. Yet the irritating feature is that the scientifically illiterate will appeal to fraud in science to dismiss ALL research irrespective of its nature. The relatively recent appearance of ‘Karen’ on FB hasn’t helped.
One of the more memorable declarations by Martin Luther was “Here I stand. I can do no other”. It requires a man of fortitude, independence and with no desire for political patronage to make such a statement in this climate. Chant would not be the first to consider his career prior to opening is mouth and that, gentlemen, is the issue.
One of your many failures as a know-all is you don’t appear to know that Dr Kerry Chant is a woman. FYI there are women doctors now.
Knit-pick if you must (you have friends here) but I’m equally famous for typos, misreated pronouns and malapropisms.
What about critiquing the content as a contribution (if you are able to do so)?
Your failure to notice half the world’s population is not trivial; it’s systemic “and that, gentlemen, is the issue”. It’s also indicative of your failure to listen to experts, Dr Chant being one – if you had, you just might have noticed her gender. As for critiquing your content, in general TL:DR.
…mmm. You have yet to critique any content that I have offered other than to express a rather basic opinion. Never mind. Ok I’ll experiement with this approach.
Task 1
Take a look at the history of announcements by the WHO and Tedros in particular and, for that matter the behaviour that caused Trump to threaten a discontinuation of funding (pot ‘n kettle now but let’s not digress). As of last night (EST), despite the
political manipulation (or perhaps because of it) Tedros “thinks” (on an abysmal track record) that there is another two years to run. Of course, time will tell.
Task 2
Ascertain if your local university library has either : Jaspers, Karl “Truth and Symbol” or Reason and anti-Reason in our Time”. Failing that there ought to be a review (of sorts) sloshing about on the net somewhere as to both books. Then look about for
a book on empiricism. A “google” ought to suffice.
Task 3
I’m only too happy to engage in an analysis of what you deem Chant or anyone else has announced do do, by all means, provide something definitive (and not general).
The “listen to experts” rejoinder was ridiculed by my debating club when in first year high school.
You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension I ought to take your tosh seriously.
You seem to have transformed in three posts (including your latest post) from taking my “tosh” seriously (hence your replies) to NOT taking my “tosh” seriously and hence your most recent reply.
There ought to be a prize for inconsistency.
Wouldn’t the counter-argument be that “sport” is travel, spectator crowds, mixing in food stalls and conveniences, interaction in changing rooms, probably no hand washing or face masks after the game and on the way home? All these are higher risk activities than staying at home.
But these are just my musings. Kerry Chant would, I expect, be able to provide her rationale for the ban if asked.
It is a fair question Keith but there is a difference, I think, between ‘stadium sport’ (attracting thousands) and kids kicking a soccer ball (rugby anyone?) about on a Saturday morning. The parents ought to be able to “social-distance” about the perimeter of the field and one does have to award a teaspoon of common sense to such activities.
It is unfortunate that the press has a contempt for detail and particularity so on matters scientific. An obvious question would have been to have Chant justify a position or identify criteria for policy, but then, i suspect, the Premier would lose the limelight.
Keep in mind that this is the Premier who shut down a pop-music gathering because one (or two?) of the attendees topped themselves on a prohibited substance. Knee-jerking. Her reelection was, I admit, something I didn’t foresee but then I don’t claim any authority on the domestic politics of NSW.
Nup. Not buying it, none of it… Any regime that requires me to carry a piece of paper explaining what I’m doing outside my home (thankfully I live in NSW, under a right wing Premier who doesn’t yet require that), one that deprives me of my ability to make a living (all of Sco Mo’s Australia) and refuses to let me cross a border to visit my family (ditto) is not one I’m ready to celebrate, label as some perverse form of “freedom”, let alone resign myself to – even grudgingly. Not for the sake of saving the elderly lives of 400 people, most of them in aged care… I’m 70 years old and If my pig-headed selfishness finally removes me from the ranks of “the left” according to Guy Rundle and the two dozen people who comment on Crikey, then I’m fine with that.
The “rebellion” I talking about won’t show up in any polls, and few will actually admit in any public forum they’re not adhering to the “rules” imposed by our authorities and all the moralistic finger pointers in the media (including Guy, to me above). They are simply making up their own minds and getting on with their lives as best they can. They don’t believe you.
For Guy to be wrong you have to demonstrate that it is widespread. His statement can be true at the same time as you seeing non compliance.
The lockdown fans can’t assume a generally compliant population forever, but for now they seem to have one.
Agreed, DH. A rough proxy for compliance could be prosecutions or at least the issue of infringements but then the policy of infringements, by the police, needs to be consistent across the country. We don’t seem to be able to attain consistency in anything.
“So you’re a dictatorship betraying the country by pandering to what people want done, viciously imposing on them what they enthusiastically support. Very rational.”
Odd, innit.
Check their brochures? I think you’ll find that “individual freedom” is all right, as long as it isn’t progressive and/or at odds with the views of the betters of ‘Conserviton’?
Sorry Guy, you have me confused…. I thought you agreed that Dan “Rainbow Bulldozer” Andrews was a relentless authoritarian?
He has been saying the right are wrong because Aussies generally support lockdown for months, you partisan weirdo.
I think you’re getting him confused with poor Bernard Keane, who was really given a message about which leader Crikey readers support.
No, the ‘rainbow bulldozer’ ref is that the Andrews govt uses privatised neoliberal policy, offset by token leftism – as in the Djab Warrung case. In the Covid case, it was the reliance on private contracting that that referred to (tho this now seems murky). I’d have liked them to impose a lockdown using actual state power – nurses, quarsntine supervusors etc trained in such and directly responsible to govt.
Good article Guy, reckon your history of RWNJ development and collapse into utter folly under pressure is pretty close to spot on.
But it will be a long time before the current LNP is able to grasp these simple truths -hopefully only after a prolonged period of political purgatory while the progressives set about the huge task of restoring herd safety and wellbeing in our societies.