'This is an era that will be examined and analysed by historians for decades. It is a pivotal moment like the world wars and the Great Depression. These moments always have political consequences' | OPINION from Shaun Carney
To survive, human beings are programmed to hope for the best. That’s why back in early 2020 many – probably most – of us believed the COVID-19 pandemic would pass before the end of the year. Remember the predicted snapback that was supposed to happen after September 2020? But here we are deep in the pandemic’s third year, with higher death and infection rates than ever before, masks still a fact of life and, inevitably, a dislocated economy.
Let’s face it: these are troubled times. The world is becoming a scarier place, everyday life is challenging and the old normal is gone. We have a legion of Australians, from children all the way to the aged, whose heads have been messed up by the fear, isolation and disruption of the pandemic. Those experiences don’t fade away; they leave a mark. The statisticians tell us we have full employment but a patchy economic outlook. There is a recovery, but it doesn’t quite feel like a recovery.
This is an era that will be examined and analysed by historians for many decades to come. It is a pivotal moment like the world wars and the Great Depression. These moments always have political consequences. Sure enough, we’ve broken with the recent past and just elected a new government – with qualifications.Credit:We had an election where the defeat of the incumbent government was emphatic, and the victory of the challenger was not.
This was effective for quite a while but for Australia to navigate the future, the nation will need something better. If the 2022 election result suggested anything, it was that a majority of voters understood that. The Morrison model had exhausted itself.Before he became prime minister, Bob Hawke regularly told a story about the Labor Party which cast it as the party to which Australians turned in the nation’s worst times.
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