What Happens Next?: Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19

By Emma Dawson and Janet McCalman

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the global economy, a reset to serve the wellbeing of people and the planet was plainly needed. As Australia rebuilds, after the immediate health crisis has passed, it must be with the explicit purpose of constructing an economically and ecologically sustainable world.

After the Great Depression and the Second World War, economic thinking was transformed across the Anglosphere, with a determination to create a more equitable society and support every child, regardless of background, to achieve their full potential.

Australia’s leaders reshaped our economy through a determined and coordinated program of post-war reconstruction. Their reforms set us up for decades of prosperity and the creation of perhaps the most prosperous and stable society on earth.

With contributions from some of Australia’s most respected academics and leading thinkers, What Happens Next? sets out a progressive, reforming agenda to tackle the twin crises of climate change and inequality. It provides a framework through which our collective effort can be devoted to improving the lives of all Australians, and the sustainability of the world in which we live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780522877229

Book preview

RECONSTRUCTING AUSTRALIA AFTER COVID-19

Edited by Emma Dawson and Janet McCalman

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-conta​ct@unimel​b.edu.au

www.mup.c​om.au

First published 2020

Text © remains with the individual contributors

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2020

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by Typeskill

Cover design by Peter Long

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522877212 (paperback)

9780522877229 (ebook)

To our parents, for giving both of us our values, and to Iris, Katerina and Henry, for theirs is the future.

Contents

Introduction

Professor Janet McCalman AC

Part 1: Reimagining Australia

Time to heal: Uluru healing the people and the land

Thomas Mayor

It’s possible

Professor Janet McCalman AC

How to start: Processes for discerning post-viral strategy

Professor John Langmore AM

An emissions and employment accord

The Hon. Jenny Macklin

The health and wellbeing of future generations

Professor Fiona Stanley AC & Dr Kate Lycett

To surge forward, not snap back

Dr Jim Chalmers MP

Part 2: A framework for the future

A modern framework for thinking about debt and deficits

Lachlan McCall

Towards an affirmational republic

Dr Shireen Morris

Rethinking government: Lessons from the National Cabinet

The Hon. Jay Weatherill

Fairness and sustainability through population policy

Dr Liz Allen

The business of building back better

Andrew Petersen

Working together for a better Australia

Michele O’Neil

Reducing inequality through the reconstruction

The Hon. Andrew Leigh MP

Part 3: Policy settings for fairness and sustainability

Infrastructure and investment for the reconstruction

The Hon. Anthony Albanese MP

Sustainable agriculture and food production

Emma Germano

Water security for rural and regional Australia

Terri Butler MP

Renewable energy to power the reconstruction

The Hon. Mark Butler MP

Making it in Australia

Emeritus Professor Roy Green

Building opportunity through economic complexity

Professor Clinton Fernandes

The case for stump-jump policy

Clare O’Neil MP

Rebuilding from the ground up: the role of the foundational economy

Emma Dawson

Part 4: Essential services for a stronger Australia

Reimagining public health in Australia

Professor Rob Moodie, Dr Tasmyn Soller & Emeritus

Professor Mike Daube AO

Rebuilding the public sector

Osmond Chiu

A social guarantee

Dr John Falzon

Reimagining school education

Dr Elizabeth Hartnell-Young

Rebuilding a sustainable and fair tertiary education system for Australia

Emeritus Professor Stephen Parker AO

Reforming employment services for the reconstruction

Dr Julie Connolly

Four lessons from the great disruption

Peter Lewis

Conclusion

Emma Dawson

Acknowledgements

Contributors

Notes

Index

Introduction

Professor Janet McCalman AC

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.

PART 1

Reimagining Australia

Time to heal: Uluru healing the people and the land

Thomas Mayor

This entire continent, now called Australia, was once a Dreaming. A place where flora, fauna, humankind and the land itself, together, determined the values and laws of First Nations society. We had no need for printed tomes, because our Dreaming, far older than any European text, was handed down in oral traditions from generation to generation, from custodian to custodian, in stories and song as far back as the Ice Age.

What a dream life was for my ancestors on this great southern continent. We were the most peaceful societies on the planet. All things had a place and moiety, and therefore all things were related. Our laws maintained balance and resolved disputes; no living being was incarcerated; our culture was one of sharing and respect. How else, experts agree, could hundreds of unique languages evolve for hundreds of First Nations in one common land, over 60,000 years?

Australia has much to learn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways, and thanks to my peoples’ resilience and resistance, Indigenous custodianship survives to this day. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge is what Australia needs to awaken us from our colonial nightmare—to cease our growing cruelty to the vulnerable, to redistribute hoarded wealth, and to end the self-destructive neglect of Mother Earth.

But to be worthy of Indigenous knowledge—in fact, to exercise Indigenous knowledge—Australia must first accept Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty and hear our collective voice in the centre of decision-making. First Nations people have decided how we should do this: we have called for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution—a guaranteed representative body—and invited you to walk with us in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

First Nations have made a new beginning possible

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a gift to the Australian people. I don’t say that to be poetic or to pull heartstrings. I say it because it is, practically, the gift of opportunity.

Presented in the centre of a canvas that is 1.8 metres wide and 1.6 metres high, the Uluru Statement is a magnificent sacred object imbued with political and cultural power. Surrounding the words is a painting of four Anangu Songlines tracking from the north, east, south and west to intersect in the middle where the statement is printed and Uluru, the rock, would be. The painting is by Anangu law women Rene Kulitja, Charmaine Kulitja, Christine Brumby and Happy Reid, and their names are inscribed between the artwork and statement along with the names of the 250 First Nations people who endorsed it on 26 May 2017 at the Uluru National Constitutional Convention. The creation of this gift was so profound and of such great national significance that it must be understood.

At the Uluru National Constitutional Convention, the participants had come from all points of the southern sky. We were there representing the accurate records of thirteen regional dialogues who elected us. Like any large political gathering working towards a collective resolution, we had passionate debates and tense negotiations. Of course we did—we were talking about changing the rulebook of the nation, the Constitution, no less.

The three-day convention was emotionally draining. Not just because we felt the weight of responsibility to our people, but also because of the stinging attacks from our detractors. Some predicted we would descend into a screaming mess, assuming that that many Blackfellas could never come to an agreement. Others had a strange expectation for Indigenous homogeneity, believing that if there were a few Black dissenters or disgruntled mob who were not invited or able to attend a dialogue, somehow the controversy would make a resolution unsupportable—an expectation that dehumanises and damages our cause.

We persevered, however, because we knew there was too much at stake—the status quo is killing us. We didn’t have the luxury of making vain, unachievable claims to placate extreme ideologies. And we couldn’t walk away refusing compromise among ourselves, leaving the next generation the same difficult task. It was time, our time, to decide how to make permanent progress. The Uluru National Constitutional Convention, the Elders expressed, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an unprecedented, and therefore powerful, Indigenous political consensus worth campaigning for.

In First Nations politics, there has never been a consensus position reached through a national deliberative process on how to achieve Indigenous goals such as strong land rights, self-determination, treaty, constitutional recognition and justice. These goals have all been promised to us by prime ministers before—none has been delivered. Before Uluru, as an activist on the streets, I realised the how was missing. It struck me that for five speakers on the stump, ten solutions would be proposed to the crowd. I noticed that our actions were reactive and the politicians were never held to account. I listened to fellow Indigenous leaders, and all too often, when asked what the steps to the grand goals were, their answers were as vague as ‘unity’. I realised I was as vague as they were, and forced myself to ask: well, unity how? Tired of slogans without strategy at disjointed rallies that never held politicians accountable for their broken promises and negligence, at Uluru I thought, this is our chance.

By the final morning on 26 May 2017, we had patched together the tattered lessons from the past and developed a roadmap to a better future. With bated breath, we watched Professor Megan Davis, an Aboriginal public law expert and one of the Indigenous members of the Referendum Council, as she stepped up to the podium to read the Uluru Statement from the Heart for the very first time. With a calm, steady voice, standing between massive Indigenous flags at each end of the wide convention hall, she read:

The Uluru Statement from the Heart

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

When Professor Davis finished reading these words, the entire room—250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with as many different First Nations and perspectives—stood as one and endorsed the Uluru Statement from the Heart with raucous acclamation. Not one person remained seated. I saw people who had been in passionate debate against one another embracing while crying tears of joy and hope.

The endorsement of the Uluru Statement was an unforgettably moving moment, and not just for ourselves as Indigenous peoples. We believed it was a moving moment for all Australians—a constitutional moment. As Laureate Professor Emeritus Cheryl Saunders AO described when I joined her and several other constitutional experts on a panel at the Melbourne University Law School ten months later:

[Uluru was] a constitutional moment: a point in time at which people rise above their day-to-day preoccupations with a sense of collective purpose; to reach a sufficient consensus so as to make a new beginning possible. These moments are rare, and they need to be seized.

A Constitution frozen in time

If constitutional moments are rare—and indeed, the Australian Constitution is said to be frozen in time—from what time do our ‘fundamental principles’ that govern us come from? The answer doesn’t bode well for any of us fair-minded Australian people, especially those of us who are Indigenous.

The Australian Constitution was conceived from 100 years of genocide and slavery without remorse. In the late nineteenth century, on the bloody bed made for its birth, white British colonial men reached sufficient consensus on how to deliver the federalisation of a colonial nightmare. This was the first constitutional moment. Not one wretched Black soul was in the room—forsaken as a dying race. In 1901, the British subjects who became Australian voted to replace First Nations Dreaming with a bland, mechanical Constitution.

In the first forty years of the new federation, Australian massacres of Indigenous people continued. And beyond the first forty years, the overt and covert acts of wilful neglect and slavery were maintained into the modern age. The Australian Constitution was not challenged by these heinous acts. Australian democracy did not hold the perpetrators to account.

In these difficult circumstances, my Indigenous activist forebears campaigned to be counted as equal citizens and to be included in the federal government’s ‘race power’, section 51(xxvi). The hope was that the federal government would use the race power to wrest control of Indigenous affairs from the cruel and negligent states. They succeeded in the 1967 referendum. More than 90 per cent of Australians, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voters, said ‘Yes’, we should be counted.

The result created the type of lasting change that only constitutional reform can provide—different from mere acts of parliament. In many ways, 1967 is the platform that my generation stands on. But painfully for my Elders, their allies and the following generations, the federal parliament broke the promise to use their acquired power to take control of Indigenous peoples from the states. When the federal government finally did—beginning with Gough Whitlam’s short reign that was ended by a constitutional crisis—they were rarely genuine or consistent, and too often worse than the states.

Both state and federal governments have since bungled Indigenous policy, squandered benevolent opportunity, and continued to oppress Indigenous empowerment. The 1967 constitutional moment, while important, fell terribly short of its mark.

In 1901 we were excluded, in 1967 we were counted but not yet heard, and therefore, as a mere 3 per cent of the population, First Nations people remain unrepresented in the cold Canberra halls of democracy. With indifference, the government wields its power to make special laws for us as a ‘race’. Australia is trapped in its past; it’s time for constitutional change.

We must accept that the Dreaming constitutes us

Australia can only reckon with its past when we have changed the constitutional structure that excludes First Nations people. We will only heal when we have power over our own destiny. This is why the Uluru Statement prioritises the proposal to constitutionally enshrine a First Nations Voice—to centre Indigenous knowledge in decision-making and to build our political power so we may hold parliament to account.

Enshrining a First Nations Voice is prioritised over agreement-making and truth-telling—partly because both are underway and partly because these proposals can be done at the state level and by acts of parliament, but mainly because both treaty and truth need a voice to effect them.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have done the hard work. We have learned from the past, strategised, prioritised and poured our hearts and our souls into a consensus providing Australia with a rare opportunity. We are leading the way in the Uluru Statement campaign, refusing to take no for an answer from politicians, fighting for a referendum so the people can decide if they will accept the gift we offer them. From all indications, the Australian people will say ‘Yes’.

As we consider ideas about how to address the twin crises of climate change and growing inequality, and as we plan the steps we must take to reconstruct our humanity and democracy, imagine how much better we would be with a constitutionally empowered First Nations Voice at the table.

When First Nations have a place at the table, we bring the voice of the land, the rivers, the sea, the flora and fauna.

When First Nations have a place at the table, we bring our principles of sharing, collectivism and respect.

If we believe that Australia should keep dreaming, we must accept that the Dreaming constitutes us.

It’s possible

Professor Janet McCalman AC

We are living through the greatest disruption of the postwar era; what is likely to be the defining historical period of our lives. And the disrupter is a piece of RNA surrounded by fat, a virus that human beings have never before encountered. A virus that ticks all the boxes for disaster: it is novel, it is highly contagious, it is transmitted by asymptomatic carriers, and it attacks and kills people whose immune systems have been undermined by disease, inequality, malnutrition, stress and age.

It’s only months since we were overwhelmed with the bushfire disaster. The climate emergency was upon us more viscerally than ever before. Sydney lost its summer to choking smoke; the glorious forests of the Great Dividing Range and eastern seaboard burnt with an unstoppable ferocity. Lives were lost, as were homes, businesses, communities, and a billion native animals. The koalas screaming in agony were heard around the world. This was not just another natural disaster: this was our global future burning before our eyes.

Then came this virus. And it has shut down the world by freezing markets and informal economies that daily feed and service most of the people of the planet. But we should understand the virus as an ecological disaster, just like the climate emergency. They are not causally related. Rather, they are expressions of the same profound overburdening of the planet by anthropogenic excess.

The climate emergency has not abated with the pandemic. Extreme weather is everywhere on the planet. Syria is gripped by its worst drought in 900 years. Locusts are swarming over East Africa. We are warned that the climatic sweet spot of the Holocene that has made complex societies possible for the last 6000 years is coming to an end, to be replaced by unbearable heat in some of the world’s most populous places.¹ Not only the year of COVID, 2020 will be the year, according to the World Food Programme, of the greatest food shortages since 1945.² And the global economic collapse, if we are not both brave and careful, will morph into a depression longer and deeper than that of the 1930s.³

This is the end of the ‘good times’ for the world, but it has been a long time coming. COVID-19 is simply an accelerant.⁴ Therefore, it is important now to focus on what has to be done, for all that stands between us and disaster is good government.

Many young people feel deeply pessimistic about the future. They have little confidence that organised society can face profound threats, survive them and rebuild. But the world has done so, even within living memory with the astonishing recovery in Europe and Asia after World War II. In 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Eighty-five million people had perished, most of them civilians, deliberately murdered by starvation or industrial slaughter or burnt alive in their torched villages or fire-bombed cities. Sixty million people were displaced and took to the roads. Polish Jews who went home to find if anyone had survived were attacked and murdered. The total of lost or orphaned children has never been tallied. The 1944-45 winter had been terrible, crops had not been planted and there was no food. Only the Russians seemed to know how to ration food and rebuild civil society: the other Allies were at a loss.

Civil society had