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AUSTRALIA

Let's not snap back but spring forward

  • 10 April 2020
‘This is not about entitlement. It’s about need,’ explained the Prime Minister in his press conference on 2nd April, announcing that early childhood education would, for many parents, now be free. Later though, he hastened to add that all of these COVID-19 measures (the government’s ‘New Economic Policy’) were temporary and on the other side of the crisis we would need to ‘snap back’ to how things were before as if society were this amazing collective rubber band.

Many of us could not help hearing an echo, in the first statement by the Prime Minister, of the formulation which had its origins in the Acts of the Apostles (which, no doubt, he has read) but which was made famous, via Louis Blanc and others, by Karl Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875: From each according to their ability and to each according to their need.

It’s funny how this proposition is routinely pilloried in ‘normal’ time. It should not be surprising, I suppose, since it stands for everything that neoliberalism does not: the primacy of the social good over the profit motive, the public provision of social goods, making sure no one is locked out or left out, allocating the resources of a society on the basis of need rather than individual wealth.

It is, after all, the principle upon which Medicare was built. Unlike the Prime Minister’s ‘normal time’ intonation of the neoliberal principle of ‘if you put in, you get to take out’, it is predicated not on a user-pays model but precisely on the idea that you put in what you can (through the taxation system) and take out what you need.

It is a principle that might be pilloried as a matter of ideological duty by the champions of neoliberalism in ‘normal time’ but it is rolled out, albeit temporarily and with significant conditionalities, as if it were simply common sense, in a time of crisis. It’s common sense because it is not only fair, it’s the most rational framework for the allocation of resources and for the contribution from each of us to the society we live in.

If we had embraced this framework prior to the pandemic it goes without saying that we would have been better prepared. The emergency measures we would have needed would have been fewer because we would have had in place a robust social
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