Responsibility, or lack of it, in the age of Covid

Heads of the federal, state and territory governments at a national cabinet press conference in Parliament House last December. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Three things I find truly astonishing in this seemingly never-ending global saga of living in a time of the virus.

Two of them are things that have generally not happened, seemingly right around the world but certainly in Australia.

The third is that not only have the “non-happenings” attracted very little comment, far less condemnation, the commentariat, the broader media and what passes more broadly as our intellectual class have never really called for them to happen.

The first is the near universal absence of anyone taking responsibility for any mistakes made in the health or the political space. If we are to judge by the number of resignations of senior politicians and their health advisers, we must have had a near-perfect policy response to the virus.

The closest we’ve got was the departure of Jenny Mikakos, the Victorian health minister during the “I can’t remember” Coates inquiry into the hotel quarantine debacle that led to 700 deaths in Victorian aged care.

But she didn’t take responsibility and resign; indeed, she said she “never wanted to leave a job unfinished”, pre-echoing Premier Daniel Andrews’ own statement that he “wasn’t a quitter”. And nor did Andrews sack her; while he said her resignation was the appropriate course of action, he “did not ask her to step down”.

But apart from this borderline example of a Clayton’s “taking responsibility”, I can’t think of any other around the country; so, it’s official: no one’s to blame for any part of any major missteps over the past 18 months.

Furthermore, that seems to be the reality just about everywhere. Obviously, I’m making a broad generalisation, but I don’t have any sense of waves of resignations or sackings.

This plays into the second “non-event”: no political leader in Australia has instituted an across-the-board pay cut of even just ministers.

When they say “we are all in this together”, they are saying we all share the mental angst of worrying about the virus, but not the financial pain that we, the political class, have mandatorily imposed on millions.

Perhaps even more astonishingly, the commentariat and the media have been broadly mute on the subject. I have some sense that early in the crisis, the idea of symbolic salary cuts by the political class might have been floated, but if so it quickly evaporated and we haven’t heard anything since.

That is, to borrow from the “cancelled” JK Rowling, until “he who must be silenced”, MP Craig Kelly called this week for the pay of all politicians and senior health bureaucrats to be cut to the same $750 a week now being paid under JobKeeper 2.3.

The call floated briefly on the usual Twitter tide and then disappeared, unremarked and unlamented – most certainly by those at whom it had been directed.

Again, I have the same sense that the universal “we are all in this together” mantra from political leaders right around the world has carried exactly the same, tiny, asterisk. Except in terms of any financial loss.

We can order businesses to be destroyed, incomes decimated, even permanently, but as we’re all Keynesians now, we need to keep up our spending for the “economy’s sake”.

I have to admit I can’t judge whether commentariat and media around the world has been as mute on the subject as our local opinion leaders.

Now obviously there have been calls more generally in the population like Kelly’s; it’s the knee-jerk reaction so often to government. A treasurer unveils a tough budget, he and his colleagues should take a pay cut and share the pain.

To me, though, what’s happened over the past 18 months is qualitatively different. This is the first time we have had political leaders at both the federal and state levels order businesses to be destroyed, order people to lose their jobs.

No the virus didn’t do it, political leaders did. To me, it seems to take a particularly acute “tin ear” not to think it appropriate by those political leaders to mandate for themselves some of the pain they are mandating for everyone else.

To have initiated it; and when they failed to do so, for the commentariat and the media to have joined in unceasing chorus to shame them.

This is especially so in the context where nowhere is taking the 100 per cent pay cut by volunteering or being “volunteered” to take responsibility for serious mistakes.

Separately though, it is a case of “one down, two to go”.

A few weeks ago I argued that three company chairs had to go; now one of them, Boral’s Kathryn Fagg, has. That leaves Crown’s Helen Coonan and Myer’s “acting” chair, JoAnne Stephenson.

Perhaps because I started with Coonan, who in my judgment “had to go” on exactly the same basis that no Australian political leader has – to take responsibility for the utter debacle Crown had become and specific things she has done or not done as chair – some assumed I was arguing the other two should also be sacked.

No, I was simply explaining reality.

That Fagg would go because Seven Group had taken control of Boral and would want to and had every right to nominate the chair, which it did on Friday with Ryan Stokes.

And something similar was going to happen at Myer. That although the company’s 40-year suitor, billionaire Solomon Lew, was only a minority shareholder and had previously failed to win shareholder support to topple the board, he now would.

Indeed, Myer’s previous chair, Garry Hounsell, had conceded that reality when he abruptly resigned earlier this year and even Stephenson had accepted the inevitability when she offered Lew board representation.

Sorry, Lew doesn’t do “representation”. The concession was a fatal if utterly realistic sign of, fatal, weakness.

What a difference reality makes in the real world against the virtual unreality and literal irresponsibility of politics.