The COVID-19 pandemic is not a health or economic crisis, but a political and leadership crisis.
Island states such as the UK, Australia and, above all, Tasmania, could have stopped it at their borders, but failed to act when they had plenty of advance notice that the disease was soon going to infect them.
Why did this happen? Partly because untrusted governments are loath to impart unpalatable truths to voters for fear of losing the next election. We cannot handle too much reality on TV when we are the ones affected. Leaders with guts would have enacted the current restrictions two months ago. They would have said something like, “I am trying to protect you, I may be wrong and being too cautious, and will bear the responsibility for my actions, but we need to act now”.
Instead they dillied and dallied, waiting to see how quickly, and where, infections occurred – the end result being every step was too little too late. Premier Gutwein has been praised for his actions, and although ahead of other Australian states, he was still too late. Tasmania was in a unique position and should have imposed leak-free quarantine when the first case appeared in Australia.
As suggested in an email to Premier Gutwein, Tasmania would have lost exports, paralysed airlines and poleaxed tourism, but these economic effects have happened anyway on top of the health crisis. Tasmania is a small island with a small population and a good, but stressed, public health system. Quarantining all entrants would have been costly but nothing like the current economic costs, let alone all aspects of the costs to our health system.
Unfortunately, we live in an era of leadership crisis, the nadir of which is the catastrophe affecting the US. Everywhere we look, you see weakness. The Western authoritarians such as Bolsanaro in Brazil and Orban in Hungary have, like the US, been in denial until the disaster was inescapable.
But weak leaders like Prime Minister Morrison are little different. Despite his continual patting himself on the back for ten years for ‘stopping the boats’, he was unable to stop the one boat that mattered, The Ruby Princess.
Unwilling to sacrifice the holy cows of neoliberalism and the free market, he was slow to act, insisting he would go the footy when Blind Freddy could see stricter measures were needed weeks previously. Invoking the Almighty would have been better placed second to pre-emptive action.
This is just ONE crisis (that cannot be ignored). So many others continue to be ignored. Although climate change has receded in the headlines, this is a global problem that will increase exponentially over the coming years and decades. What are our leaders doing about it? Next-to-nothing, although this pandemic is giving the planet the chance to heal itself owing to the massive drop in vehicle, ship, aircraft emissions and industry shutdowns.
Venturing into town to buy groceries, it was interesting to see the logging trucks still carting their loss-making and environment-destroying loads. Now, of all times, one would have hoped we could give our battered forests a respite, but the plunder continues. Now that we have been shown, via a bat in China, that the continuous assault on our ecosphere has consequences, are we too silly to heed this warning and for our leaders to act immediately to halt this planetary desecration?
Have we not learned that economics is a servant of humanity and not its controller? What does economics matter to a dead planet, and the billions of victims that live on it?
When considering the future from which we have become ‘untethered’, it is worth considering the words of a Hongkongese:
“There can be no return to normal because normal was the problem in the first place”.
Mike Buky sailed from the UK to Australia 22 years ago. Horrified by the way the planet is being treated, he tries to be kind to his small corner.
