Coronavirus changed us — but how?

Maybe we can chuck out our collective narcissism and obsession with influencers while we are at it. Picture: Instagram

Our personal lives, nature of work, social interactions and movement patterns changed dramatically during the lockdown. Some of these changes will be temporary while others are here to stay. How the lockdown changes post-corona Australia is not written in stone. We are collectively shaping this future.

Let’s run through a little exercise that I was taught by Jason Clarke from Minds at Work to find out what post-corona Australia might look like: the renovator’s delight. When renovating your house, you keep the nice things, you chuck out a lot of old stuff, you change things around and you add a few things too. Which parts of our lockdown life do we want to keep? What do we want to chuck, change or add?

KEEP: We hope to keep the good things

We want to keep our new-found appreciation for essential workers. We want to continue to offer workers the opportunity to avoid the commute and work from home more often if they want to. After years of the OK boomer v avocado snowflake rivalry we want to continue the caring attitude of the generations towards one another. Let’s keep the high frequency of meaningful interactions with our immediate family members. Let’s not give up on the check-ins with our friends and distant family via video calls. We are focusing more on the message (“Stay at home to save Australian lives”) instead of evaluating how much we like the messenger (“I can’t stand the sight of that guy”). Can we also please keep TAFE free to help the struggling middle class?

Appreciation for our frontline service workers should remain. Picture: Andy Brownbill

CHUCK: We want to chuck out our lockdown problems

Let’s get rid of the egotistical hoarding instincts that we displayed in the first weeks of the pandemic. Maybe we can chuck out our collective narcissism and obsession with influencers while we are at it. Maybe we already left peak-Kardashian behind? Let’s stop the politicisation of infrastructure spending. We will need to agree on what infrastructure to invest in during the post-corona economic recovery. This process mustn’t be slowed down by political bickering. Video conferences are great, but let’s lose the habit of turning even the simplest five-minute check-in into a Zoom meeting with oh so funny backgrounds — a quick chat on the phone will suffice. On a more serious note, we must combat issues of loneliness and domestic violence that appear to be rising dramatically during lockdown.

CHANGE: Some of our behaviours need to be changed

We have started already with most of these but still have a long way to go. We need to listen to the experts instead of the showmen. If we want working from home to become the norm, we must assess workers more on output rather than on attendance and likability.

We will want to rethink our consumer behaviour. Do we need this item? Is this item of decent quality? Should we try to buy more Australian-made products? Moving away from high-consumption consumerism may benefit our wellbeing but it’ll hurt our retailers. This means the main streets in towns across the nation must develop a clear strategy to continue to attract customers.

Panic buying emptied shelves in stores around Australia early on.

ADD: We need to add a lot to prepare for the post-corona world

We must add to the incomes of essential workers. The increased appreciation of such work is important but fair pay is the real thing. The working-from-home crowd will need a separate small study, meaning developers increasingly will need to add a bedroom when targeting young knowledge workers. We need to add to the national medical stockpile to be ready for the next pandemic or other disruption to the global supply chain. This is best done by adding to our local manufacturing capabilities. We must add an infrastructure program to get the squeezed middle class re-employed. Such a program will be financed throughout the 2020s by the largest tax-paying group, the millennials. Therefore, millennials must benefit more than other generations from such a program to avoid a looming intergenerational conflict. There are many more ideas out there that are worth discussing. We are in a phase of opportunity where previously unthinkable ideas suddenly stand a chance.

This list of keep-chuck- change-add is by no means complete, nor am I in a position to dictate what the future of Australia will look like. We urgently need a public debate about what Australia needs to keep, chuck, change or add. It’s crucial we collectively debate what we want post-corona Australia to look like as long as we have a chance to actively shape the future.

Simon Kuestenmacher is a director of The Demographics Group.