"Abstract
Australia’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely perceived to have been a successful one, based on the relatively few number of lives lost to the virus compared to the rest of the world. There remain, nonetheless, serious ethical challenges at the heart of the Australian response to COVID-19. The broadly positive outcomes of Australia’s pandemic response mask more troubling developments within its political culture, and the costs it has imposed on its society. This article examines two concerns in particular: the normalisation of fear and emergency through the language and policy responses adopted by governments, and the significant diminution of individual freedoms and human rights...
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There are at least two major ethical concerns raised by this particular Australian response to the pandemic. First, governments have normalised fear and emergency through their language and policy responses – with a special emphasis on the use of police and the military in delivering what are nominally described as 'public health' interventions. Second, this response has seen a significant diminution in individual freedoms, which have been comparatively pronounced in Australia because of its lack of constitutionally protected rights and freedoms, not to mention the absence of vibrant political debate about the place of liberties in pandemic responses seen elsewhere. What is especially striking in these developments has been how limited dissent has been, particularly among those sympathetic to human rights, social democracy and progressive liberalism. Erstwhile reliable stalwarts of rights and freedoms have been noticeable quiet in speaking out against COVID-19’s effects on Australia’s liberal democratic culture. As we explain, this may reflect a certain ideological character to public understanding of the pandemic: the political conflicts revealed by COVID-19 seem to have reinforced divisions and discourses associated with a so called 'culture war' that has come to define contemporary Australian politics...
This willingness to accept the emergency measures, reflects how, for many Australians in the public square, there has been strong acceptance of a trade off between liberty and safety. The absence of public opposition has just been the necessary, and reasonable, price to pay during a global pandemic. If there has been a diminution of personal liberties, it has only been temporary, the argument goes. Once the pandemic passes, we will be able to revert to the old normal.
In our view, however, there is strong reason to believe that the cumulative effect of the pandemic – the lockdowns and the policy responses – has had a troublingly corrosive effect on Australia’s political culture, including on public understanding of the place of core freedoms in Australia’s democratic practices. There has been the continual expansion of executive power...
There is in all this a strong danger that the political culture is transforming into what some political scientists have described as an 'allegiant' culture. This is a political culture characterised by an emphasis on order and security, deference to authority, limited democratic protest and compliance with institutions. It stands in opposition to an 'assertive' culture, which is characterised by civic participation, direct action and skepticism of authority."
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