Looking to 2022, and a glass half full

If ever there was a time for unity, for vision, for self-sacrifice, for cool-headed rational thinking and action, it is now.

Crazy times: a scene from the lockdown protest in Sydney in July. Picture: AFP

Towards the end of every year, the common shtick among commentators is to look back at the trials of the previous 12 months – natural disasters, political mismanagement, business failings – and express hope that the coming year must be better. And to be fair, that’s the way things seemed to be playing out in January. The vaccine was coming; our freedoms were being restored; there was every expectation that 2021 would be an improvement on 2020.

And yet here we are, nine months in, and coronavirus is not yet under control, there’s less economic support, tens of thousands of Australians are stranded abroad, we’re still playing catch-up with the vaccine, we’re battling social unrest in our capital cities and we’re unable to work together as a federation.

But that’s not the worst of it. We are reassessing our strategic relationship with a country that is likely to be the most powerful economic force on the planet by the middle of this decade – one that seems to have us in its sights as an example of Western arrogance that must be taught a lesson.

And now, with America’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan, we have the realisation that our usually reliable ally of the past 70 years appears to have miscalculated on a grand scale; the ramifications of this are reverberating around the globe. We now realise this decision was made unilaterally, in the perceived interests of the US, without so much as fleeting consideration for its allies. These are serious times.

At least the drought has broken. And the rollout of the NBN was completed just in time to carry the load of the work-from-home revolution in response to the pandemic. These two factors lessened the impact of the coronavirus, especially for knowledge workers.

I am confident we will come through these times, but not without some bumps, bruises and possibly worse. We are an island nation. We are well resourced. We have skills, alliances and the willpower – the feisty determination – to retain our way of life, especially if provoked. We have not flinched, let alone capitulated, in the face of targeted economic coercion. This response from a people well used to prosperity is heartening; it speaks to our national character.

But there is something else we need to address, and it goes to the heart of the way we think. Our foundational thinking is flawed, or at least skewed, by the economic freedoms we have enjoyed in the past 30 years. We presume (rightly or wrongly) that the prosperity and security underpinning our way of life will somehow continue into the future.

At the beginning of this year it didn’t occur to me, or indeed to most Australians, that the Covid situation could get worse. We thought, “We’ve beaten this.” And why wouldn’t we think that way? Unfettered prosperity for decades tends to create a culture in which the “hardship” bar is set low. We’d been through tough times; now, we decided, we could get back to normal.

It did not occur to corporate Australia (for decades) that China wasn’t on a pathway to adopting Western values. So of course it made sense to outsource manufacturing to Guangzhou and to adopt an efficient and clever just-in-time supply-chain strategy.

Now we have moved into a different world in which calamities are apt to compound and attract (or inspire) other calamities. Looking ahead, who knows what 2022 might deliver? If ever there was a time for unity, for vision, for self-sacrifice, for cool-headed rational thinking and action, it is now.