COVID-19 and the normalisation of abject and unmitigated failure

Though you never see it in the movies, London in 1940 was in political uproar. The repeated failures of leadership, imminence of invasion, housing shortages from the blitz, wildcat occupations of private air raid shelters and much more all made some leftists wonder if there was not real revolutionary potential.

The problem, noted George Orwell — one of the plotters — was “a week of disruption and the Germans will be here”. So the inherited image of the era is quite the opposite: everyone pulling together, making tea, keeping calm and carrying on.

We appear to be in the same position. The need to make do with the situation we have, improvise, cope, be public-spirited, is concealing the fact that our situation is a product of the federal government’s abject failure. We need to step back and make this clear to ourselves as a first step. 

The failure is utter, epochal, without mitigation. Through sacrifice and the effective leadership of state Labor premiers we had this thing beaten down, before vaccines became available. Indeed our defeat of the virus dovetailed nicely with the availability of the vaccines.

Had we secured a supply, or developed our own through a revival of our national scientific capacity, we would have passed from safety to safety in time to be prepared for the Delta dawn. 

Yet we can’t name this abject failure, because we have to be focused on dealing with the consequences of it. So the dealing-with becomes the means by which the failure is normalised. Mustn’t grumble. Keep calm and carry on. Really, the federal government should have fallen by now.

The independents should have pulled their support, and one or two Libs should have crossed the floor to bring on a no-confidence vote. It would have been the only response commensurate with this disaster. 

The failure is a direct result of the Coalition’s indifference to the life and health of its own citizens, and that is a product of its changed nature, from being a party with a social base and mediating institutions to an isolated grouping filled with ghost branches, an ageing membership list, and a client-dependence on corporate donations.

Elites eventually come to disdain the people they rule over as a way of defining themselves against them, and one wonders if that has not occurred within the Coalition as it lurches between said clientelism, hidden ideological agendas and decadence and decline — as represented by the return of Barnaby Joyce.

One wonders also what role Christian belief has played in this disaster. For two decades now, Christian evangelicals have been taking over the Liberal Party, and they now have a prime minister from the truly extreme end of it — the “go to the church your dad started in his garage” end, as I understand it.

Religious faith per se doesn’t predispose you to fatalism, but the literalist Christianity of Morrison and Co does, especially given literal notions of an afterlife. Death, in such frameworks, is merely a portal through which you pass to come out substantially as you were on the other side. Indeed, one wonders if that lies at the root of Scotty’s Star Trek obsession: the teleportation thing as a concrete image of life and death.

Because of course it was in response to things like disease that notions of an afterlife arose in the first place. Life’s bounty could not be so routinely foreshortened, so subject to caprice. There had to be something more. Has our prime minister been a bit too comfortable and relaxed about whether Australians live or die? 

The mix of evangelism and dispensationalism swirling around Australian born-again Christianity also makes you wonder whether Morrison sees himself as a servant of the Australian people or a servant of God first and foremost. By definition, any Christian would have to see themselves as the latter, but a non-literalist Christian could see that as wholly mediated by, and expressed in, their public role. Literalist Christians don’t have that luxury.

Morrison’s speeches often contain some element of proselytising. “Science begins in belief,” he said, wrongly, at the National Science Awards, his first major speech after becoming PM. That should have been a clue. Not only about what he thinks science is, but about what he thinks of himself as called to. You can see what he was trying to do. It’s like the Moonies love-bombing lonely backpackers. You’re looking for the people in the crowd who feel lost, so you can hook them and reel them in — the whole “fishers of men” thing. 

The point is, if you’re a literalist, evangelical Christian, you have to do this sort of thing. It’s your duty. The kingdom of God overrides the kingdom of men, which is why evangelicals stayed out of all politics for decades. Sooner or later that contradiction will be tested. Was that what happened in this case, this disaster that condemns us to months, maybe years, of disruptions that might have been avoidable?

Both the first wave of the virus, and the Delta variant, were precursors, rehearsals, dry runs… Call them what you will. They were a chance to develop a response and a mindset ahead of the possibility of something far more lethal 10, 30, 50 years from now. Or two. Our national government failed its own people totally. We need to know more about why it did — and to keep that failure at the front of our minds, as we deal with the consequences.