The COVID divide
The pandemic continues to develop without our leaders developing a strategy to honestly deal with it
The Albanese government has made its voice known on many issues, proud highlight its positions when compared with its predecessor, but it has been conspicuously reticent when speaking about COVID. Penny Wong makes a significant splash on the foreign stage, Chris Bowen seeks to transform the nation’s energy future, Richard Marles overshares with Washington, and every senior minister from Jason Clare to Amanda Rishworth looks to leave a legacy, but the same can’t be said for current Health Minister Mark Butler.
The global pandemic was thrust upon the Morrison Government, and it had to somewhat act accordingly due to overwhelming expectations. While most LNP members held public positions against some of the lockdown measures, the sentiment from the public seemed to expect a strong response from leaders, and this was echoed by state Premiers from both political persuasions. For the final year of the Morrison term, the nation was well versed in all things COVID and expected the at least the same level of engagement from their government. Australians were talking about the science of armchair epidemiology like it was the footy. Coalition Health Minister Greg Hunt felt the heat around his botched vaccine rollout, and the Morrison government ultimately felt this heat at the ballot box on election day.
While in opposition, the ALP was talking about COVID through lens of focus groups and polling numbers. It worked well on radio and did well at televised debates, and it conveniently reflected the public sentiment. By the time they came into government, the vaccine rollout was underway, Perrottet and Andrews were shaking hands and talking about opening-up like the good old days, and the pressure from the titans of industry had forced the doors of Westfield open again. Labor made loud and proud its victory but slinked quietly into its COVID responsibilities, going with the flow, and largely ignoring them. And many of us, waiting for what we assumed were some guidelines or a roadmap, were tentatively content to ignore them too.
The new Labor government has also proceeded to strip away any remaining pandemic safety nets left behind by the Coalition. Not much more than a month after the historic election, in the second year of a pandemic marinated in economic woes, inflation, and a spicy layer of interest rate rises, Mark Butler announced the end of paid pandemic leave, in line with the decision of his predecessor. Around the same time, in an economic environment that worsened each week and sent millions of Australians into compounding poverty, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he would be keeping the Stage 3 Tax Cuts… in line with the decision of his predecessor.
Now the Reserve Bank of Australia openly tells the workers to take a pay cut for King and country in order to “save the economy”, a sentiment echoed by many in these circles wanting the Australian worker to risk themselves in inadequately equipped and unsafe workplaces. In a sellers’ market, with huge demand for labour, and the exploitable features ensuring wage stagnation that have bugged Australians since Work Choices in 06’, the RBA is still confident enough to demand that workers live with COVID-19 in pre-COVID-19 workplaces. And to do it for less money.
The Morrison Government handled the pandemic in a diminishing way from the start, flowing down into the society in the form of a trickle-down recklessness. Back in early 2021, when Chief Health Officers were on coffee mugs and the epidemiologists were household names, the public better understood the nature of the disease. As soon as the national cabinet participants referred to the partially delivered vaccine as a Panacea, dumped mask wearing in public and washed their hands, the rates skyrocketed.
The initial National Cabinet meetings occurred during the lockdown period turned from meetings to devise government health guidance based on mitigating the effects of largely unknown global pandemic in an unvaccinated population, to the age of “personal responsibility” and leave without pay in a partially vaccinated population. As the simulated football crowd noises of 2020 were replaced by record crowds on ANZAC day 2022, so too were any remaining control measures.
Partly due to a new way of living with COVID, 2022 finished up with orders of magnitude more death and attrition due to the endemic disease, a seventeen percent increase in heart attacks partly due to its impact on comorbidities, declining growth and mortality, and several Vietnam wars worth of casualties in the aged care wings and COVID wards of hospitals. We went from common sense mask wearing in public during ‘waves’, to hoping you don’t catch the bloody thing for a third time at work. We used to hear about the deaths at daily briefings, how old the victims were and where they were located, just as the papers once posted road tolls and even heroin tolls in their publications. What happened to the COVID tolls that rise every week, and claim the lives of many who were not ready to go?
Flying in the face of everything, with all the gamified Jobkeeper payments, the massive concessions and the bull runs for the corporate juggernauts, the RBA puts the working poor on the chopping block with its latest decree and doesn’t mention those things much at all. It’s what you expect from a board of CEOs who make decisions in their ventilated and COVID-safe environments, next to portable air purifiers, living with the virus in vastly different ways to the numbers on productivity charts working underpaid unsafe jobs for profit-swollen corporate Australia.
The worlds richest gathered – after a mandatory PCR test, of course – at Davos this week, under UV lighting and HEPA filtration. Back in Australia, the Prime Minister met with Bill Gates and declared the pandemic over amidst the highest levels of death since the pandemic began. In juxtaposition, some of the storerooms, depots, factories and meatpacking plants, in the low-ceilinged office buildings and common lunch areas and the aged care homes and classrooms, “COVID-safe” has defaulted to “COVID-invisible”. And living with the virus has become exactly that, a form of inevitable Long COVID in an inevitably unsustainable situation.
The pandemic profits for the wealthy soar alongside mortality among the hardest economic times in recent years, and our government lacks the political courage to deliver any sort of guide to explain what living with COVID responsibly actually looks like. This abrogation has thrust the onus on employees and employers, landlords and tenants, residents and their care providers to negotiate their way through it on their own. Changing a couple of filters on a dirty water-cooling system in a bunched-up office, or opening a window up in a smoko shed is small potatoes compared to the alarming evidence about the prolonged damage of COVID, and personal responsibility is not going to be enough to implement the proven measures that can mitigate its spread.
Bosses argue over affording budgets for air scrubbers and PPE in the next financial year, the executive class WFH and get personal assistants to wear masks in meetings, and all the while their workers are sent back to toil in unsafe environments that put their lives at risk. Of the hundreds of people who have died from COVID in Australia since the year began, how many of them are, and will continue to be, the people that our government chooses to sacrifice for productivity over safety? As this government looks to forge its legacy, their achievements may come to appear small when compared with the legacy left behind by this pandemic.