We can’t stand for the parliament not sitting

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg in the House of Representatives on April 8, when parliament last sat in Canberra. Picture: Getty Images

Wallace Brown, a great friend and mentor, said many wise things, but one particular reflection of his has stayed with me for years. We were walking to lunch, something we did often, although in retrospect not often enough, when Wallace said quietly: “We all have to die of something.”

The context was important. Not long before that, my sister-in-law had died suddenly, followed soon after by the death of my sister from a long illness.

Wallace was not being callous. Far from it. He was at his philosophical best in the face of the most awful news and my devastated reaction to it. He had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. A man much loved and respected for his generosity and his sensible work-life balance, Wallace spent decades reporting on federal politics as Canberra bureau chief for Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper. Wallace is fittingly remembered and celebrated every year by his family with an award to the best young gallery journalist, won in the first year by Patricia Karvelas, then on The Australian and now with the ABC.

If the deaths of friends and family, either prematurely or through long periods of suffering taught me anything, it was the importance of perspective and an enhanced appreciation of what truly matters in life and, above all, life itself. Nothing else that has happened — my house destroyed by fire, being out of work for a long period of time, losing friends through reporting or writing — painful as they have been, comes even remotely close to the traumas of losing loved ones.

Another lesson is that life is too precious to waste. Or to live in fear. I am particularly reminded of Wallace’s words these days when millions have been compelled to live in bubbles to avoid a deadly virus.

We have shown we are prepared to do whatever it takes to try to preserve what we have, for a few months if necessary, but clearly this way of life, for longer than that, is not sustainable.

Despite encountering a few monsters in the health system over the years, my faith in Australian doctors and medical researchers, and their ability to fix so many things, remains boundless. Australia has always had brilliant medical researchers. They haven’t always been well supported by governments, nor have their discoveries been capitalised on locally. More often than not, they have been manufactured overseas — something else that must change on the other side of this thing. So there are good reasons to share the optimism of Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty that a vaccine will be found.

However, we also have to confront the possibility that it may not. The national cabinet meeting today must grapple with this possibility as it considers how slowly and in what order to restart economic and social activity.

We do not know enough about this virus to judge how it will behave over time. We can only guess. But we do know how people will react if they remain without work or their liberties remain severely curtailed over the long term, despite the success of early compliance with a repressive regime.

There could be another extinction rebellion movement, more aggressive than the one on climate change, which has forged alliances between generations. This one would be spearheaded by the “old”, the baby boomers, the ones who can manage without carers or walkers, thank you very much, who have rebelled against almost everything from birth, itching to challenge the new order.

That doesn’t mean Australia’s problem of an ageing population could be resolved swiftly for the government by mass outbreaks of reckless behaviour. It does mean that we may have no alternative but to treat COVID-19 as another risk factor in daily life — like flying or driving or being hit by falling objects.

Consenting adults will have to learn to navigate a vastly different future, with the help of sensible guidelines from officialdom (emphasis on sensible) instead of the morass of new rules which place surfing or sitting on a park bench as a greater threat to social order than golfing in some jurisdictions.

Rigorous testing and tracing of contacts, the continued closure of external borders to people, not goods, will remain as important safeguards. Internal travel restrictions will need to relax and some forms of social distancing remain as a fact of life.

Politicians, with less scrutiny, more responsibilities and more power than we have seen since wartime, have latched on to the war analogy to describe this fight. As with every other war, we are entitled to know what the exit strategies are — one with the prospect of a vaccine and one without. We need to know everything about the road ahead that governments know, and what a victory, or partial victory would look like. As they make life-and-death decisions literally every day, they need to let go of their natural instincts to suppress information and brush aside difficult questions.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo may have got a few things wrong along the way, but he was right when he tweeted: “Facts are empowering. Even when the facts are discouraging, not knowing the facts is worse. I promise that I will continue to give New Yorkers all the facts, not selective facts.”

We have not heard anything like that from anyone here. We have a right to know everything about the worst possible scenarios and the best possible scenarios governments must have mapped by now, so we can be parties to the decisions about where we go from here.

And I mean we.

While the national cabinet has been working extremely well, it is not the national parliament. That is in hibernation. If Scott Morrison is right about schools, and he is, then the example he should set for parents and teachers is to recall federal parliament. Executive government has a tendency to think of parliament as a nuisance, however this is precisely the time it should be sitting and we should all be insisting that it does.