When Victoria entered ‘hard lockdown’ in July last year, the media and the public were keen to find someone to blame. Fortunately for the narrative, a story quickly emerged that quarantine-hotel guards had been sleeping with guests during quarantine. Outrage followed and it was cathartic for all involved to have someone to blame for what was, frankly, a scary and deeply unpleasant situation.
Except it never happened. The real story was a lot more complex and, to be fair, a lot more boring. The problem was systemic. The process of hiring security guards for hotel quarantine had been sub-contracted to small operators, who then employed people under insecure, low-wage conditions, and skimped on basic safety measures such as training and the provision of adequate PPE. There were also systemic failings in the health system and the aged care system — many again relating to poorly paid insecure working conditions, coupled with a legacy of earlier austerity measures and a related shift to privatisation.
All this was exposed in the subsequent months, including during the COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry, and yet apparently the lessons were not heeded. For example, when South Australia entered a snap lockdown in November 2020, it was partly because a hotel quarantine security guard initially told contact tracers that he had been a customer at a pizza bar where another worker was infected. In fact, the security guard also worked at the pizza bar, but had been initially reluctant to admit this. In response, Premier Steven Marshall placed all the blame for lockdown on this one individual worker, saying:
‘To say I am fuming about the actions of this individual is an absolute understatement. The selfish actions of this individual have put our whole state in a very difficult situation. His actions have affected businesses, individuals, family groups and is completely and utterly unacceptable.’
It must have felt great to shift the blame on to some nameless worker, but it’s important to acknowledge that the real blame here, again, lay with employment conditions. The security guard wasn’t working two jobs for kicks — he was doing it out of necessity, because neither of them paid enough and neither were sufficiently secure. Blaming him did absolutely nothing to fix this systemic issue. It was merely a distraction from the need to fundamentally reform employment conditions and stop pretending that the ‘gig economy’ benefits anyone except those at the top.
Case in point: in January this year, parts of Perth went into a five-day lockdown after a hotel quarantine guard contracted COVID-19 and was reported to also work for a ride-share company. At least this time the media reported comments by President of the Australian Medical Association WA branch, Dr Andrew Miller, who emphasised that ‘the situation was not the man's fault. … He was someone trying to do his job but he was put in a situation where he was set up to fail by using inadequate quarantine facilities.’
'...we are going to have to make a conscious effort to decrease our focus on individual conduct and to place more emphasis on the systems that need reform.'
Despite this, the appeal of the blame game appears to be unabated.
Although there has been a reasonable level of attention paid to governance issues — such as the incredibly slow vaccine roll out, the ongoing problems with hotel quarantine, and the timing of the lockdown itself — Sydney’s current lockdown has also been marked by an unhelpful focus on individual actions. First, the limousine driver who first contracted COVID-19 from an international flight crew was pilloried by police, politicians and media for his ‘inexcusable actions’ in exposing the community to risk. A big show was made of investigating the possibility of charging him with breaching public health orders, only for the police to conclude, ‘there is insufficient evidence to establish that either the limousine driver or his employer breached any public health orders’ — which is weasel words for, ‘nothing he did was against the law, because we didn’t provide safer regulation, but we’d still like you to blame him, thanks.’
Following this, we have seen people attacking Sydney-siders for spending time outdoors during lockdown — despite the incredibly low levels of risk — and generally seeking to police individual conduct rather than paying attention to the systemic issues that exacerbate risk. Most recently, the federal government released a graphic advertising campaign targeted at Sydney residents. It features a woman gasping for air on a ventilator, followed by the message to ‘get vaccinated’. Given that the actor does not appear to be over 40, and the vaccine roll out has not yet reached those under 40s (unless you count the mixed messaging around Astra-Zeneca), the campaign has been met with anger by younger people who feel they are being scapegoated for the government’s vaccination failures.
Why does this matter? Well, it particularly matters because the individual blame narrative is a perfect justification for the authoritarian, punitive measures that our governments have been so keen on adopting throughout this pandemic. Instead of being met with critical scrutiny, these measures have largely been welcomed by the majority of Australians who appear to feel safer under this approach.
In fact, recent research has demonstrated that our experience of this pandemic (and, more particularly, the leadership response provided by our governments) has made Australians more conservative and care less about others. Over the past year and a half, Australians have become more individualistic and selfish, and less supportive of human rights. As we lurch from one emergency (COVID) to another (climate change) this does not bode well for the treatment of the most vulnerable in our community — or, indeed, for the kind of community that we will foster in response to these challenges.
If we want to shift this narrative, then we are going to have to make a conscious effort to decrease our focus on individual conduct and to place more emphasis on the systems that need reform. Focusing on, and fixing, systems might be complex and even boring, but it is the only way we are going to address the underlying causes of the issues that scare us and make our lives less pleasant — be they a global pandemic, unemployment, rising inequality or climate change.
Dr Cristy Clark is a senior lecturer with the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra. Her work focuses on the intersection of human rights, neoliberalism, activism and the environment, and particularly on the human right to water.
Main image: Illustration Chris Johnston