We must not waste this crisis, because the stakes could not be higher. What happens next will determine our health and wellbeing for generations.
COVID-19 is a terrible disease and an effective vaccine may take years. Modern medicine is very good at keeping people alive long enough for their immune systems to fight back, and death rates in countries with strong hospital systems are falling. Otherwise, all we have is prevention, and for prevention our most important tool is organised society. The quality of states around the world is now being measured in human lives lost. It is a brutal accounting.
The modern state owes its growth to public health—a political transformation that began in the midst of the cholera-pandemic years of the nineteenth century. Public health recognises that the individual is only safe if the society is safe: that the health of one depends on the health of all. It is no different with global warming—like the virus, the climate emergency threatens everyone.
And as COVID-19, like a heat-seeking missile, probes weaknesses in the body, its social determinants—poverty, crowding, insecurity, malnutrition, chronic disease and unfairness—create its richest human fuel. It relishes weak or corrupt states, even very rich ones, that have abdicated their duty of service to the people. It thrives on inequality and injustice.
But there are the causes of the causes, beyond the emergence of a novel coronavirus. These are the deep environmental stresses of exponential population growth and planetary exhaustion, fuelled by the fossil economy over the past 250 years. The climate emergency and the pandemic share a deep ancestry.
This deeper crisis will drive the emergence of other novel diseases that cross to humans from the natural world or from intensive livestock farming, just as it will trigger more natural disasters—fires, droughts, floods and famine. Above all, the inequality of the world, both within nations and between them, is what places us at greatest risk.
The majority of urban workers in the world, including many in rich countries, depend on the daily exchange of goods, services and money. The precariat has replaced the proletariat, so that quarantining the market economy leaves people with only their government to fall back on. And as with cholera, if the poor get sick, then eventually so too will the rich.
This is the extent of the crisis. It goes beyond the pandemic and its immediate economic disruptions, as painful as they are. It has eaten into the deepest recesses of the human enterprise and exposed its vulnerabilities, even in a wealthy country like ours. And despite the risks of infection, people have been protesting around the world that Black Lives Matter and that inequality has gone too far. Perhaps this time, just perhaps, there will be change. There is much to be done.
What Happens Next? Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19 offers a rich cast of thinkers and doers from politics, economics, business, farming, governance, health, welfare, media, and education both higher and lower. No one has a complete recipe for recovery. Not all would agree with each other, but all offer insights and pathways to be explored. Neither are they pessimistic: indeed, when solutions can be imagined, there is hope.
One of the good things to emerge from Australia’s pandemic has been the explosion of discussion, webinars and talks as we Zoom across institutional, geographic and cultural borders. This national conversation must grow, and this book is a contribution to that. What matters is that we learn from each other, find some common ground, and focus on the reconstruction. The virus has delivered us a diagnosis. Now it is time for the recovery.
The recovery requires a national reconstruction—more than simply a rehabilitation to what we were. Since colonisation, the weeping sores that have never healed are those of racism and unfairness. We have never lived up to our ideals of the ‘fair go’ for all, nor to the requirements of a constituted Commonwealth, founded for the common good.
The book begins with an invocation from Thomas Mayor of the promise of the Uluru Statement from the Heart—a gift to the nation of reconciliation, a just rebuilding through a Makarrata. Such a reconciliation between First Nations and settler Australia could also lead the healing of the land and of society, teach us how to form partnerships instead of factions, and find consensus in place of conflict. This, we hope, is what will happen next.