A lack of attention can be devastating. Enraging

Frustration: the scene at a Sydney testing clinic. Picture: Damian Shaw

Attention connects. It’s a hand reaching out, a gift, a balm; it mollifies and repairs. A lack of attention can be devastating. Enraging. It can create monsters. Think of the indignant roar of those men facing the retreat of the liberated woman’s subservient attention. The incels who feel the uppity women of this era aren’t giving them enough reverence. Trump’s acolytes who feel belittled, left behind by the woke brigade. Anti-vaxxers rampaging maskless through city streets and protesters lighting the doors to that grand old lady of our nation, old Parliament House.

They all want attention. To be listened to. Seen. A lack of attention can trigger violence, destruction, anarchy; it can also stimulate change at the ballot box. And over this fraught summer it felt like the Australian people were being ghosted, in terms of attention, as a wily new Covid variant raged among them. How quickly will we forget the trials of our festive season, when there seemed like a void, an abrogation of responsibility at the nation’s heart? There were struggles with Covid testing queues, home testing kit supplies, hospital staffing, grocery supply lines. The festive season was ruined for many as they struggled with Omicron’s muscularity. Did the governments – state and federal – understand the depth of the problem? Prepare?

It felt like a struggling populace was not given the gift of attention by politicians bowing to their gods of ideology over the grim realities of medicine; a PM holding up his Christmas barra and laughing at the cricket. Australia had been the envy of the world for so long, holding the line with brutal lockdown sacrifices. But in mid December, NSW premier Dominic Perrottet decided to let it all rip. Just as Omicron was taking off.

The consequence: uncertainty, fury, panic. And as a new school year loomed. All my life there’d been a perception of this country as an efficient, enviable nation, a paragon of smooth functioning. Yet over this summer that perception broke down, and shockingly quickly. What would Australia be like in war, if we were ever invaded? In terms of being prepared, fleet of foot, quick with readiness. What I saw over this summer was a failure to lead when we needed it most. A friend, a despairing Sydney GP, said “the silence was deafening” in terms of how her business was expected to manage through the crisis.

It felt like the nation was being gaslighted. There was a void in terms of meaningful, visionary action. In early January a reporter asked the Prime Minister how many rapid antigen tests he’d personally paid for. Morrison’s response: “I’ll have to check with Jenny. She’s the one that goes and gets them.” Political journalist Samantha Maiden tweeted, “… this is something (some) men do that’s fascinating. Annoying things (childcare, kids dentist) magically happen offstage, conjured by wives. And it’s so easy to get a RAT? Didn’t you know? “Picked one up!” Except YOU didn’t. No wonder he doesn’t think [it’s an] issue. Never bought one.” We, the scrambling public, thought it a huge issue.

It felt like the nation had squandered years of hard work on suppression in the name of ideology. In the political instruction manual the hugest sin, surely, is incompetence. Forgivable? We’d had two years of practice to be better at this. And when history looks back on this Covid era, will it conclude we bowed too much to the will of politicians seeking re-election, as opposed to the wisdom of scientists?

Attention is a gift of respect. It makes the recipient feel validated, listened to, understood. Will a lack of attention over the summer result in a punishment from the voters at the ballot box? The government will be banking on us forgetting our summer of trauma and swiftly moving on. Will we?