The coronavirus pandemic is causing widespread upheavals to how we go about our personal lives, how we interact with others, and how we work. It is also disrupting our traditional methods of making the future, notably in how our governments approach societal challenges, how our parliaments function, and how citizens exercise their right to protest.
We have been forced to innovate at the personal and work levels. We no longer shake hands, we resist the urge to hug, and we limit ourselves to much smaller groups for social functions. Video conferences (complete with children and pets) have replaced face-to-face meetings and travel, many of us are working from home, and some have voluntarily reduced their hours.
Anecdotally, and for now at least, it seems that many people are taking advantage of the chance to recalibrate their lives and to spend more time with their immediate families and friends, and are enjoying the slightly slower pace and flexibility that working from home allows.
Of course, thousands of people are not so lucky in the lucky country, and have lost their jobs or face unsettling job insecurity. And young people are wondering what the disruption to their education and early careers - not to mention the mountainous government debt - will mean for the future they inherit.
When it comes to how Australia makes its future, there are also promising signs of innovation that will serve us beyond the pandemic. The refreshing “both-and” approach to both health and the economy during the COVID-19 response stands in stark contrast to the “not today” approach that blighted Australia’s response to the bushfire disasters (where there is a need to both address the immediate emergency and tackle climate change as the longer-term root cause). The “both-and” approach is a departure from the recent default position in the national conversation of presenting fundamental challenges and opportunities as “either-or” choices. Australia’s refusal - over decades and regardless of who was in power - to address interconnected issues together covers the spectrum from social to economic to environmental.
In the weeks and months ahead, Australia needs to apply the “both-and” approach to returning our elected representatives to Federal and State parliaments. This needs innovations to make sure that parliamentarians are both role-modelling COVID-safe behaviour and carrying out their duties to make decisions and be held accountable. If we can keep businesses running with videoconferencing technology, why can’t parliaments work remotely? In fact, running parliament remotely on an ongoing basis would allow for more flexible and responsive decision-making, more family-friendly routines for MPs and their staffers, and eye-watering savings to the national travel budget. It might even make it easier for MPs to avoid incorrectly claiming travel allowances.
And, as a democracy, Australia needs to find a way to both enable civil protest (whether about Indigenous disadvantage or climate change or whatever people want to protest about) and keep society safe from the coronavirus. If the AFL and NRL can innovate to enable their teams to assemble for battle on the sporting field, surely society can innovate to enable citizens to engage in the democratic battle of ideas.
We’ve shown we can change our ways to address more than one thing at once (both health and the economy) in our response to the coronavirus. The opportunity now is to improve how Australia makes its future more broadly, not just for the immediate response to the pandemic but for the decades to come as well. We can draw inspiration from the innovations that we are already implementing in our daily lives, at work, and in sport.