In the last fortnight or so the climate of public life in Australia has changed. After the wintertime of isolation, acquiescence and solidarity, now there are rumours of vernal pastures for individual planting, reaping and profit taking.
Visions of profit and plenty for us and trickle down for others abound. Miners want hand-outs; football clubs want license to play their close contact games; big business wants to be able to move its pawns around the chessboard at will; groups hard hit by the virus and economic recession want support; tourist resorts want encouragement for visitors. We all have a vision of a better society and want it implemented for the benefit of people like us, and sometimes of people unlike us.
For comfortable communitarians among us it is tempting to lament the loss of the solidarity displayed in the first response to coronavirus. That would be a mistake.
Solidarity is not a mood to be looked back on with nostalgia, but a commitment to be built and defended. Nor is the noisy spruiking of a myriad of claims for priority and support during the recovery to be lamented. It should be welcomed as a natural response to testing times of great need. It expresses the necessary involvement of the community in the recognition and choice of directions to be taken.
The challenge in the recovery, as it was during the initial crisis, will be to ensure that as a society we have a reliable compass to guide us as we make our own proposals, as we hear the claims of others, and as we adjudicate their merits and their relative priority. The true north to which the compass is adjusted must be the common good of the whole society, and particularly of people most disadvantaged. The adjustment incorporates the principle that each person is precious because they are human, not because they contribute to the GDP.
It is the responsibility of society as a whole and of each of its citizens to accept these compass settings, and of government to commend them and to ensure that they guide all its own processes of planning, consulting, evaluating and administering. That is what solidarity means.
'Governments must hear both noisy and quiet Australians.'
In the abstract that may seem straightforward. But it presupposes a high level of acceptance at every level of society. It supposes, for example, that we all assume the good faith of people