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Ah, how they floated in the clouds, back before the first world war, those decent heady phrases: the common good, the living wage and how they came across the seas, those writers and professors, to study what we’d done down here.
At the fringes of the legal system, there are areas of work you probably won’t read about in law school career guides. Many of these deal in trauma or poverty. They are substantial, but they aren’t celebrated or pursued by the mainstream of the profession. They generally attract neither money nor prestige, and in many cases the ‘market’ fails to provide paid jobs of any sort, irrespective of need.
Our frontliners are usually our younger workers. They are the ones trying to pay rent or save a deposit on a house. They are the ones trying to cope with children, the costs of child care and space for their accommodation and play. And yet we depend on them in a crisis like COVID-19, and we pay them less.
Politics in the best sense is returning to normal. To do so it first needs the federal parliament, which should not have been filleted in the first place, to be fully functioning. More will then follow.
The dweller in the bone attic holds countryside as home; thinks of food, safety, health and warmth for family, self and group. Frenetic scuffles rage in the brick canyons where the hunt is commerce and food constructed.
The new ASIO Powers Amendment Bill 2020 is being rushed through Parliament in a time of pandemic, guaranteeing that it will lack even the minimal level of scrutiny normally accorded to legislation dealing with ‘national security’.
Nothing in the world is single, as Shelley said, and we have proof of this in the general reaction to COVID-19. That spirit, however, seems to have its limitations. For some politicians are set on dividing people, rather than on uniting them.
We have done a lot right as a nation during the pandemic, but on the whole we have not treated foreigners as well as we might have. The inequality of treatment has been in evidence during the twin health and economic crises brought on by COVID-19.
The question remains, however, is there a straight binary trade-off between granting the state power (to organise lock-downs, track its populace and coerce the people) and keeping its people safe?
While I stay by my mother, I glean only the edges of the news; already the horror of the fires has been at full stretch. In the quiet room where my mother lies, I think of people trying to sleep in unfamiliar environments, refugees from the fires.
In Australia, every politician from Canberra to the Northern Territory is insisting on isolation measures and avoiding close contact, keeping to distances of 1.5 to 2 metres. When it comes to the very practice of democracy and political representation, the social distancing imperative has been approached with confusing inconsistency.