The State of Liberal Democracy in Australia
The Authoritarianization of Australia and the World #2
Victoria and New South Wales are undoubtedly leading the way in Australia, as far as authoritarianism goes. But according to a wide cross-section of media voices – who consider it a source of pride and can therefore be conditionally trusted – the regulations imposed by Victorian authorities are by far the harsher of the two. It has been a constant refrain throughout the ongoing Sydney outbreak that the NSW government under Premier Gladys Berejiklian has reacted with an inexcusably light touch, allowing transmission and COVID-unsafe libertinism to run rampant, because she was too weak-willed to impose any strict measures.
I hope the first article in this series demonstrated that the claim was significantly wide of the mark, but I raise it here for a different reason. The deployment of this rhetoric in Victoria was largely a not-too-subtle device for implying its unstated corollary: that we don’t want to be like those philandering New South Welshmen, and in order to be as different as possible we must be as strict as they were blasé.
As I begin writing this on the 24th of August, we have just seen this narrative run its predictable course. Case numbers in the middle-twenties for five consecutive days, not rising or falling, were a sufficient pretext for the Premier to announce, in an hour-long tantrum and harangue – which some sources have called a “press conference” – that the State would once again be placed under an arbitrary, unscientific and profoundly overreaching 9pm curfew, along with the closure of playgrounds (no seriously), and the modification of the state-wide mask mandate to specifically disallow temporarily removing ones mask to drink a beverage. That, Ms. Berejiklian, is how strict parenting is done. Wait, did I say parenting?
These frankly extreme, unjustifiably harsh reprisals have been wheeled out as a blatant punishment for a public which has outraged its premier with its libertine behaviour: families picnicking outdoors with masks but exceeding the two-family limit, twenty-somethings having a beer outdoors in large groups, and so on. The Premier quite literally expressed his petulance as the primary justification for this illiberal spree: right, no more beer outdoors, no more playgrounds or playdates, and no going out after 9pm, you’re all grounded. What has happened to our country? More disturbing to contemplate, what has happened to the legions of adults who cheer on the Premier?
What is Happening to Our Political System?
Freedom of Movement
The changes to our political system which have been justified by the COVID-19 pandemic are numerous and, in many cases, startlingly severe. The very first measure taken by the Federal government was to close our borders – not only halting all immigration but banning Australian citizens from leaving the country as well. Stopping movement into the country is among several policies which have been employed in most of the world’s countries, but only an extreme minority have halted outbound travel.
State governments have also instituted varying degrees of border control, restricting travel within the country to almost nothing and requiring the few citizens who are able to cross borders to undergo a 14-day quarantine as a condition of doing so.
Although the restriction of outbound travel is the more severe restriction of the human rights of Australian’s, the greater consequences are those resulting from the restriction of inbound travel. Most significantly, as of April this year there were still 40,000 Australians stranded overseas.1 On top of this, the plight of Australians stranded abroad highlights the uneven enforcement and costs of repressive government policies along class line. Whilst making a cynically dishonest slogan of the false notion that “we’re all in this together,” the accession of unprecedented power in the hands of an unelected public health bureaucracy has resulted in the entrenchment of a privileged class of public “servants,” the politically connected, and those they favour. The most egregious manifestation of this is the fact that Hollywood actors and other celebrities, politicians, and athletes who the government favours have continued to enter the country easily and in significant numbers. Similarly, AFL and NRL teams have been allowed to cross borders without being required to quarantine for 14 days, at the same time as ordinary citizens have been denied permission to return to their home state for reasons as compelling as the resumption of their cancer treatment. For these people – the wealthy, well-known, and well connected – political purchases privileges which inherent human rights cannot purchase for ordinary Australians.
And to say that these tens-of-thousands of Australians are ‘stranded’ does not adequately describe the consequences which our governments policy is imposing on them. Like any limitation of fundamental rights, one of the practical flaws of our policy is that it arbitrarily prevents individuals from reacting to their unique circumstances and local knowledge to make the decisions which are best for themselves and for society more broadly.
In this case of closed borders, people are prevented from going to the places they need to be for their own safety, or for the support or protection of their loved ones or communities.
The quality of health care varies significantly between, and sometimes within, countries. Those living overseas who may be vulnerable to COVID-19 will have had to reassess whether remaining in their current country of residence is still viable for them considering the development of the pandemic.
Perhaps, more altruistically, as comparatively wealthy, fortunate Australian citizens living abroad, it might have been appropriate for those living in more disadvantaged or less medically equipped regions to return home rather than unnecessarily burdening the healthcare system where they are living.
The circumstances which might cause someone living abroad to come home might have nothing to do with COVID-19. Perhaps their family’s business back in Australia is struggling and they want to support them. Maybe a relative needs care. Perhaps – as we have seen more than once – a loved one back in Australia is going to die soon. They might lose their employment or suffer declining health and no longer be able to support themselves abroad. They may be living in politically and economically unstable regions in which it may already be, or might become, too dangerous to remain.
Centralized and Unaccountable Power
Another early measure taken by the Federal government was to form a ‘National Cabinet’ to run the national response to the pandemic, basically akin to a war cabinet and incidentally the first time such a body had been convened since the Second World War.2 This cabinet, and much of the discussion it has raised, speaks to a wider trend of centralized power and increasing power of the Executive, at the Federal level as well but just as importantly within each state. The National Cabinet is, after all, a forum of the executives of Australian states and territories established so those executives could collaboratively discuss and determine how they will respond to the pandemic.
The operation of the cabinet was intended to be confidential, invoking the exemption of federal cabinets from Freedom of Information requests (FOI’s). Fortunately, the legitimacy of this privilege made its way into the courts and was prudently overturned on the basis that the ‘National Cabinet’, consisting of members from each of the state governments, may be a ‘national’ body but is clearly not a federal body.3
The degree to which the public was being kept in the dark about the operation of the National Cabinet is indicated by the terms of the FOI request which triggered the legal proceedings. The information sought by the request included: how decisions of the National Cabinet are reached; whether these decisions are binding on the Commonwealth and/or the states and territories; whether any jurisdiction has the right of veto over National Cabinet decisions; which, if any, federal, state, or territory officials are allowed to listen to or participate in the National Cabinets proceedings.4
The important point, at any rate, is that the Premiers of the states and Chief Ministers of the territories govern the pandemic response of their respective jurisdictions unilaterally, and that although they established no formal or informal means for parliamentary input or oversight of their policies, and in most cases neglected to engage in even minimal consultation with the community, they did set up the National Cabinet to facilitate discussions and consensus amongst themselves.
The New “Normal” in Policing
The factor which has probably contributed most to the overall trend of authoritarianization is the bizarre reliance on police to be the main instrument of pandemic control policy. The problem is twofold: firstly, the very fact that this is happening demonstrates that our approach to what is after all a public health problem is far too reliant on punitive and behaviour control measures. Australian pandemic policy is not a public service administered to the people, it is a rulebook enforce upon them. Secondly, it has served as the pretext for a dramatic increase in the degree of power which police forces wield over the public, and at the same time has fundamentally altered their relationship to that public, where they are now playing a role in which the basis for interactions with the public are no longer exceptional and dangerous circumstances but all circumstances, and the scope of those is interactions is no longer limited to those who have committed a crime and the victims of crimes but extends to every single person.
Having the police enforcing regulations which pertain to health is problematic enough, but the broad new powers they were given for this purpose have predictably been deployed in support of their ordinary duties as well. If new powers are justified for the purpose of addressing of a public health emergency, this doesn’t mean those powers can be used for any reason, they are only justified specifically and exclusively for the purpose which justified them.
And naturally, having been handed enormous power to supposedly protect the publics health and predictably discovered that enormous power really helps with their pre-existing agendas, the police in many states are now seeking to keep some of their newfound powers permanently. In Western Australia, Premier Mark McGowan has observed that all but closing state borders and deploying extensive police resources to control those borders has coincidentally led to a 25% drop in the consumption of methamphetamine, and therefore proposes to maintain a permanent police presence at the border specifically for that purpose, as well as giving them the power to search any car entering the state.5 For now, the WA Police still have COVID regulations, which have enabled them to make a series of large busts at the border outposts they established to limit the spread of the virus. They have also sought data from the state’s G2G app, which is intended solely for tracking and tracing to address COVID, to investigate crimes. In another instance which sparked public outrage, “[they] served orders on the state's Department of Health to produce the check-in data of more than 2400 West Australians - who were at a motorsport event when a Rebels figure was shot - and had used SafeWA despite a pledge from the state government the information would only be used for containing the pandemic.”[14]
What is Happening to Our Culture?
Both the willingness to trade basic liberties for a measure of safety – not to mention that this part of the Australian population is not only willing to trade their own liberty but feels they have the right to trade everybody else’s as well – and the hysterical shouting down of anybody who questions the government line point to one of the significant issues of the pandemic: possibly the greatest single driver of the rapid cultural change happening in this country is fear.
The extant academic writing about COVID-19 and fear, especially in the field of psychiatry, is more revealing than you might expect. One paper outlining research conducted by the authors into how several individual characteristics affect one’s perception, and fear, of COVID-10.6 One of the traits they were interested in was neuroticism. A few things stood out to me amongst their introductory remarks, for example that “some experimental researchers have found neuroticism is the most significant trait that leads people to more robust conditioned fear responses,” which suggests “that neurotic people are more sensitive to signals of punishment (Gray, 1976, 1982). Garcia and Zoellner (2017) reported that people with high levels of neuroticism perceive higher levels of risk and show attentional biases toward ambiguous stimuli.” The authors hypothesized that neuroticism was positively associated with fear of COVID-19 and their findings conformed to this hypothesis. In other words, the more neurotic a person is, the greater their fear of COVID-19 is likely to be.
Believe it or not, I have long believed that neuroticism was the trait most central to the changing personality of this country. And what could be better designed to nurture the public’s neuroses than the response of our governments and press to COVID-19? Really, now. Every weekday, the Premier of each state holds a press conference specifically about coronavirus, whether there are seven hundred new cases or just one. At the “press conference” I referenced above, the existence of 25 new cases drove Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, to ominously warn the public that “we are at the brink, and we need to step back from the brink.”
The oversaturation of media and discourse by the disproportionate fixation on COVID is so extensive that I feel compelled to relegate what I have written by way of explaining the extent of this oversaturation to a footnote.7
Q
It may not be especially surprising, but it is still worth noting the finding of one paper that those who were least worried about COVID were generally those who reported to feeling a high degree of control over whether they become infected with the virus.8
One fact referred to in this literature is especially relevant to our present purpose: that, is that dysfunctional worry is not only associated with adverse effects for the worried individual like depression, but effects which have a social consequence, crucially heightened levels of prejudice. For instance, one study conducted by surveying a demographically representative9 sample of adults from the US and the UK noted that “a substantial proportion of participants also expressed an intent to discriminate against individuals of East Asian ethnicity for fear of acquiring COVID-19.”10
But this is just one of the ways the pervasive hysteria surrounding COVID-19 is fuelling the accelerating authoritarianization of our culture. An especially prescient piece which appeared on the BBC website in the early months of the pandemic noted that “fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity.”11
Our moral judgements become harsher and our social attitudes more conservative when considering issues such as immigration or sexual freedom and equality.
The article goes on to explain how “various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease.” I would suggest, however, that it would be more accurate to say we become more respectful of authority, as subsequent events have amply demonstrated. Indeed, we have seen repeatedly how fearful populations will submit completely to the wisdom of authority figures even when their purported wisdom flies in the face of convention. It may seem like a superficial quibble, but the difference is very significant.
Bearing in mind the difference between conventionality per se and simple conformity, the articles thesis is otherwise very sound, and very revealing too:
Schaller first primed participants to feel threatened by infection, by asking them to describe a time when they had previously been ill, and then gave them various tests that measured their tendency to conform. In one test, he presented students with a proposed change to the university’s grading system, for example – they could vote by placing a penny in a jar marked “agree” or “disagree”. A heightened sensitivity to disease led the participants to follow the herd and place their penny in the jar with the highest number of coins. They were swayed by popularity rather than going against the grain with their own opinion.
When asked about the kinds of people they liked, meanwhile, participants who were worried about illness also tended to prefer “conventional” or “traditional” individuals, and less likely to feel an affinity with “creative” or “artistic” people. Apparently any signs of free thinking – even invention and innovation – become less valued when there is the risk of contagion. In explicit questionnaires, they are also more likely to agree with statements such as “breaking social norms can have harmful, unintended consequences”.
The article explains these psychological responses in terms of our prehistorically evolved responses to uncertainty, stemming from situations in which the danger posed by a threat we didn’t understand was often mitigated by social conformity...
The same logic may explain why we become more morally vigilant in an outbreak. Studies have shown that when we fear contagion, we tend to be harsher when judging a breach of loyalty (such as an employee who badmouths his company) or when we see someone who fails to respect an authority (such as a judge). Those particular incidents would do nothing to spread disease of course, but by flouting convention, they have given a signal that they may break other more relevant rules that are there to keep disease at bay.
This passage speaks particularly clearly to recent experience in Australia, where the public has responded with unusual vitriol to numerous deviations from the prevailing norms which although they did not actually increase the spread or risk of COVID-19 may very well have been taken unconsciously as a sign that someone can’t be trusted to obey the whole system of norms the public has come to entrust its safety to.
Perhaps you can detect shades of the Australiana public in this passage, too:
In the same study, a reminder to wash their hands led participants to be more judgemental of unconventional sexual behaviours. They were less forgiving of a woman who was said to masturbate while holding her childhood teddy bear, for example, or a couple who had sex in the bed of one of their grandmothers.
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The issue of proportionality in coverage of COVID-19 was well understood by a researcher focused on the role of emotion in journalism who contributed an article on the subject to the Conversation.12 As he suggests, news coverage doesn’t necessarily tell us what to think, but it does tell us what to think about; news outlets, by definition, must allocate limited resources, airtime, page-space, etc., to a large number of subjects and stories and are therefore forced to make subjective editorial judgements about what is or isn’t worth paying attention to, relatively speaking. This has long been recognized as one of the problems with the notion of ‘objective journalism’.
The author, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, tells us that fear can spread in much the same way as a viral contagion, both being social processes. And research “has consistently shown that when issues receive extensive media coverage and are prominent in the news agenda, they also come to be seen as more important by members of the public.”
Wahl-Jorgensen tracked the reporting of COVID-19 between January 12, when the first reports about the virus began to appear, through February 13[2], using a UK database of “almost 100 high-circulation newspapers from around the world.” Over the course of that one-month period, those 100-odd newspapers collectively published 9,387 stories about the virus.
Of these, 1,066 articles mention “fear” or related words, including “afraid”.
Such stories often used other frightening language – for example, 50 articles used the phrase “killer virus”. ... For example, The Sun’s coronavirus liveblog routinely refers to the virus as a “deadly disease”.
She further contrasted the tone of news about coronavirus with coverage of seasonal influenza, “which is estimated by the World Health Organization to kill 290,000 to 650,000 people around the world every year...”
Since January 12 2020, world newspapers have published just 488 articles on the seasonal influenza without mention of the coronavirus.
In sharp contrast to coverage of this novel coronavirus, fewer than one in ten stories about flu (37 of 488) mentioned fear or similar phrases.
‘Celebrities in Australia anger stranded citizens over “double standard”’, Frances Mao, BBC News, April 1, 2021.
‘Leaders in unprecedented 'national cabinet' to tackle coronavirus’, Nick Bonyhady and Jennifer Duke, Sydney Morning Herald, March 13, 2020.
‘Nowhere to hide: the significance of national cabinet not being a cabinet’, Anne Twomey, The Conversation, August 6, 2021.
‘Patrick and Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (Freedom of Information) [2021] AATA 2719’, Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal, 5 August 2021.
‘Border police to have extra powers’, Paul Garvey, The Australian, March 3, 2021.
’ Neuroticism and Fear of COVID-19. The Interplay Between Boredom, Fantasy Engagement, and Perceived Control Over Time’, Barbara et al, Frontiers In Psychology, October 13, 2020 (Volume 11).
The Ubiquity of COVID in the Press:
Not only do many people tune in to this grim new episodic performance art in their own state, but a substantial number of people also watch the daily COVID press conference of more than one state, devoting a part of the afternoons that follow comparing and contrasting the finer details.
As a journalist and someone who feels it their duty to keep a critical eye on the press, I read the mainstream papers prolifically. Aside from buying several physical newspapers every day and maintaining a labyrinthine knot of RSS feeds on Feedly and Flipboard, I long ago augmented this by subscribing to the newsletters maintained by numerous Australian and international newspapers. Aside from the obligatory ‘Daily Rundown’ type newsletter, and from the better rags the occasional newsletter devoted to topics they consider their specialties, most newspapers also have a ‘Breaking News’ newsletter you can subscribe to, which will send word directly to your inbox the moment the days biggest stories begin to unfold.
The bar for what qualifies as ‘Breaking News’ has been lowered substantially over the course of the pandemic. Every day, now, the crack teams which maintain this service for both the Age and the Australian will unfailingly send me a breaking news alert with that day’s Victorian case numbers: “Breaking news: 3 cases of coronavirus in the state of Victoria!”
And it doesn’t end there, either. It isn’t just the daily press conference for each individual state, and the seven unique stories from each major newspaper covering the daily press conferences of each state, and then finally the repackaging of said press conferences most basic revelation – the daily tally – as ‘breaking news’. No, it’s every other story as well. In a society in which neurosis is so widespread, which has been stoked to a pitch of hysteria by the daily exhortations of official doomsayers, what could be easier or more profitable than publishing endless articles about the virus which you have elevated to the one ubiquitous fear.
It’s disturbingly illustrative to take a snapshot of today’s accumulation of newsletters: I haven’t cherry-picked or chosen a day which sufficiently illustrates my point, I’m simply opening my emails on the day I happen to be writing this. And in addition to the breaking news that there were 50 new cases in Victoria today, which was broken to me by both the Age and the Australian, I also have the benefit of The Age’s ‘Examine’ newsletter which today is about COVID[a]; The Age’s ‘PM’ newsletter, a daily news roundup in which todays lead stories are about COVID[b]; another ‘breaking news’ alert from The Age about one of the COVID stories from its PM newsletter; yet another breaking news alert from The Australian about COVID[c]; the Spectator’s ‘Morning Double Shot’, another daily roundup which today leads with a story about COVID[d]; The Conversation’s main newsletter, which today is about COVID[e]; WIRED’s main newsletter which today is about COVID[f]; Inside Story’s daily newsletter, which courageously breaks the mould by having only one of its three lead story’s about COVID; and finally The Ages ‘AM News’ newsletter, a morning roundup featuring 2/3 stories about COVID.
Perhaps you suspect I’ve glossed over the more representative samples which weren’t about COVID. I did omit a handful of publications which weren’t focused on COVID for convenience, but only because the only publication that weren’t were foreign newspapers. For the sake of transparency, the newsletters I omitted were: The Dispatch, an American Substack newsletter; The Associated Press’s ‘Tuesday AP Morning Wire’; CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter; and a handful of newsletters from the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Caixin Global, a Chinese newsgroup.
[a] ‘Victoria, NSW, and the path to Reopening’, specifically. [b] ‘Pfizer vaccine access widens; Which postcodes have active COVID-19 cases, [c] ‘NSW hits 6m jabs, records drop in cases’ [d] ‘Let these lockdowns be over soon’. [e] ‘Cases are surging in Israel’. [f] ‘Would it be fair to treat vaccinated COVID patients first?’
‘Functional and dysfunctional fear of COVID-19: a classification scheme’, Reka Solymosi et al, Crime Science 10, February 5, 2021.
‘COVID controls highlight need for national human rights laws’, Tim O’Connor, The Age, August 15 2021.
‘Knowledge and Perceptions of COVID-19 Among the General Public in the United States and the United Kingdom: A Cross-sectional Online Survey’, Pascal Geldsetzer, Annals of Internal Medicine, March 20, 2020.
‘The threat of contagion can twist our psychological responses to ordinary interactions, leading us to behave in unexpected ways’, David Robson, BBC News, April 2, 2020.
‘Coronavirus: how media coverage of epidemics often stokes fear and panic’, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, the Conversation, February 15, 2020.