THE FAIRFAX NEWSPAPERS HAVE long figured in this country as an expression of liberalism's two-facedness; as the cliché goes, able to entertain two opposed ideas at the same time, and put them both in a single edition. That they can be demonised by the political Right as the mouthpieces of the inner city élites and also by the political Left as unashamed barrackers for corporate and boss power, and that both can be right, is only credit to Fairfax/Nine's editors. Consider this pair (the italics are mine):

Shaun Carney, 'As we prepare for recovery, we should ask what "recovery" will mean'

As we prepare for recovery, we should ask what "recovery" will mean. Before we went into lockdown, our economic model was sputtering. Wages had long been stagnant, growth was tepid, and we were too reliant on the import of cheap manufactured goods and human beings for our prosperity rather than our own ingenuity through innovation and entrepreneurialism.

John Hart, from the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), quoted in Fergus Hunter, Business backs easing of restrictions to boost corporate travel:

"There is a hell of a lot of movement around the country that is business and corporate-based and that's a really important start of the restart, particularly as we start to see business events picking up again."

Mr Hart said there was a case for eased quarantine arrangements for countries deemed low-risk and travel should be permitted based on the benefit individuals were bringing to the Australian economy.

Here is the model for the 'new normal', a set of classes for participation, according to one's worth. There are cheap human beings (migrants and their grandparents), and worthy human beings (richer migrants and executives), the first is explicitly denied a place, the second gets its plastic card for entry into the QANTAS Club of post-pandemic Australia. This is not a division of human good, it's a division of productivity and, needless to say, a colour bar. In fact the new normal looks a lot like the old normal, just shittier, and with the mask torn off; a society of crass inequality in which one class gets excluded from the future, and the other gets to have free muffins and beer at airports.

In an extremely serious pundit voice, we we all be asked—as we prepare for recovery---the Devil's own question:

“Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?”

JESSICA IRVINE WROTE ON the subject of 'weaning' the nation off the coronavirus support Jobkeeper. It is less economic thought, which is her specialty, than Methodism, which is a school of economic moral order.

Because JobKeeper, as a public policy, is not a keeper. A policy that pays some people to do nothing is not a long-term plan, despite what advocates of a Universal Basic Income might say.

This is exactly wrong. It's not even about creating UBI or Citizen's Income, In fact our society pays many people very well to do nothing, for good and bad reasons, and has done, without protests or disagreement, for a long time.

Sometimes it's extremely good, and deliberate. The aged pension (low as it is) is one of the great innovations of modern life, perhaps the greatest. Old people shouldn't be working, or starving, or dependent; that's only civilised. Sometimes the money we pay as a society isn't for people to do nothing, but to do something else that's more important: parents on maternity/parenting leave are hardly expected to 'do nothing', but we all agree that parenting an infant is worth more than any possible profitable work. Sometimes it's just exclusive: the point of sick leave isn't only humane acceptance that sick people can't work, it's to avoid the kind of communal infection we're all very familiar with these days.

Sometimes it's a deferral and an investment. We all pay taxes, as a society, to keep young people in schools and universities, where they're productive at improving themselves and each other, but earn nothing. Partly that's about making a down payment on a better future, with more educated young people, but it's also about keeping those same young people out of the full-time workforce. Nobody wants to be the jobseeker competing against a child, or wants to live in that kind of society.

Sometimes it's bad, and we just accept the status quo. Returns on capital investment are precisely money for doing nothing; it is the money itself that has done the work, reproducing itself in the unique way that capital does. When an owner of an investment—whether that's a bond, or a term deposit, or an inheritance, copyright on someone else's pop song, or a rented-out house—gets their regular payment, no work has necessarily occurred, and that work that does (repairs, account fees) is incidental. Rents don't exist without policy, or a system of law and regulation to enforce them; a society of landlords and rentiers is precisely one where some people are paid, by expectation of the government and public, to do nothing.

Anyway, don't take my word for all of the above, take Bertrand Russell's, who said it all far better:

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

We all saw, at the height of anxiety in March and April, an opening of possibilities and immediate action on things that we'd been told were impossible. Tortuous, degrading, and pointless 'mutual obligation' requirements from Centrelink and JobSearch providers were removed. The rate of Newstart was lifted. We won free childcare. Many workplaces, especially white-collar ones, became much more flexible in their arrangements for working from home. Suddenly, we didn't have to get a medical certificate to prove we had the flu to claim sick leave. And most of all we were presented with the necessity of rethinking, at least for a bit, which occupations were truly necessary and which were luxuries—the heroes of the day were the cleaners, the garbage collectors, truck and forklift drivers, supermarket cashiers, posties, childcare workers and teachers, as well as the nurses, doctors, and medical staff.

Irvine gets to the point of the just-so story further on:

But, if government is to step in when needed, it must also step out when not required. That is the ultimate goal, after all: an economy which can largely stand on its own two feet.

But economies never stand on their own two feet, and governments don't step out—to continue the metaphor, their policies and assumptions and regulations are the bones on which the muscles of flesh move. A better metaphor would be that the Government steps behind the curtain, where ideology obscures it. Someone has to enforce tenancy rules. Someone has to decide when old people are allowed to access the pension. Someone has to decide what's taxed and what isn't.

When the crisis recedes—if the crisis recedes—we will get to choose what's a 'keeper' and what's not. Who will we continue to allow to get money to do nothing?

LIKE MOST I WAS impressed and awed at the crowds who attended protests against Aboriginal deaths in custody this weekend. It's all I can do to walk on the footpath on the way to work. If you'd asked me on New Years Eve what challenges I'd be taking on this year, I wouldn't have picked agoraphobia, but here I am, and here we all are, walking backwards away from people, trying to avoid our bosses who like handshaking and slapping people on the back. I can only admire the fortitude of tens of thousands of people facing that, as well as the prospect of arrest, capsicum spray, and a beating. I can only groan as, completely predictably, the protesters' good faith in marching is seized on in bad faith by hoteliers, wedding planners, and other people interested in getting a profit.

But agoraphobia is where we are as a society, in the broader sense as well as the simple fear of crowds. Australia is genuinely I think scared of engaging communally in politics, and isn't capable of recognising the political (as opposed to the press gallery identifying instances of 'leadership'). In place of groups engaging in struggle for power, honestly and in the open, we have gestural nods to the past---I'm thinking here of the Prime Minister's disinterral of The Accord, second-time-as-farce---and simple media coverage of the horse-race of electoralism.

The great feature of the culture war in 2020 is the abandonment of the idea that people might want to gather together in good faith to obtain political outcomes. The nasty epithet social justice warrior on the political Right is a nod to this; it asserts that all one's opponents' ideals are either for show or insincere cover for other aims. The tedious continual return of conspiracy theory on the political Left, that all political ills are Murdochian and driven by profit (or worse and more disgusting variations), is a mirror image of the same certainty---that nobody believes in anything, and that genuine convictions are for gulls, suckers, and villains.

The most agoraphobic of all Australian societies was Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland. Joh was Premier from 1968 to 1987, effectively ruling a one-Party State on the principles of support to 'development', anti-intellectual parochial philistinism, hostility to all kinds of social minorities (but especially Aboriginal people), and a tolerance at all levels for corruption. One-party States like his are politically agoraphobic, both physically, in that they are hostile to protests and organised groups, but also formally, in that all relationships to power cease to be communal, and become client-principal ones. It was a culture of providership as well as of brutality and corruption He was successful in a way that endures today, and the key aspects of Bjelke-Petersenism are also now key aspects of Australian political culture---including the increasing domination of one particular Party. Let's tick some boxes and see:

• Welfare (or support from the State) is for the deserving; businesses, and your voters. There are by definition, no needy.
• Abiding complacency and mediocrity in cultural life.
• Demonstrations and physical gatherings are self-interested, dangerous, and to be punished.
• The media who are paid to cover you can be brought to your side by pretending to folksiness, and savviness, and letting them be part of the kayfabe game of shared beers and insider-ness, while the rest should be dealt with by physical hostility and the force of law, and
• Always, always argue in bad faith.

IF THE SPRING OF popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime?

—Robespierre, Maximilien

THE MINING COMPANY RIO Tinto was recently responsible for the blasting of a set of highly significant caves in Juukan Gorge in the Hammersley Ranges. This was legal; Ministerial authority under Western Australian law gives consent to this kind of mining development, which can then not be held up in other courts. By contrast, Heritage Acts across the States protect non-Aboriginal cultural heritage more elaborately. In Sydney, the Sirius Building, whose redevelopment was, in a similar way, given direct consent by the Minister, was looked over by the Supreme Court, and saved from demolition. Plain racism explains a great deal of the distinction, but not everything.

Australian public culture, in contrast to its relaxed self-image, is one of the most rule-bound and officious of the world. We are protective of European cultural heritage, particularly old buildings, with the world's most elaborate and developed system of assessing and evaluating 'heritage', in part to offset (as David Lowenthal put it) the 'curse of recency'. The Burra Charter leads the world as a set of organising principles for cultural significance and Australia ICOMOS, like our Olympic athletes, punches above its weight in world heritage. Had the caves in the Pilbara been merely a terrace house in an inner-urban suburb in an east coast city, they would have had their pick of arenas to battle for protection, from appeal to administrative tribunals to Interim Heritage Orders. Nobody dynamites urban heritage; at least not like that: a well-paid professional is hired by the project manager to write a report separating the non-significant from the Heritage, and only then the blasting caps are laid. Gold for Australia, protection for the significant, iron ore for the export market!

It isn't just that white eyes see more value in Federation bricks than in the Aboriginal past (though they do), it's that officials and conservationists both have established Heritage as a systematic exercise in listing and assessment and development consent, which, because Australia is the country it is, exists in a plane superior to the real, and certainly greater than the questions of history and memory. We value heritage, and have given it a place in the Pantheon of our society's treasures: the project manager's spreadsheet list, complying with all the applicable frameworks, of consent items to close out. A former colleague, a town planner (the greatest legal originalists of all), warned me once about reading intention or outcomes into the planning system---the only thing that matters is is the letter of the law, because that's how the application forms will be drawn up, and forms are where power is exercised.

I've written before about my culture's many resemblances to that of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. Complacent self-satisfaction, a tendency to 'misrecognise miraculous good fortune as good management', and a fear of change, a set of national myths and historical stories that are ridiculous on their face but are taken extremely seriously, a fixation on baroque culture war arguments and personal honour, monuments upon dedicated memorials upon sacred chapels upon monuments, and of course, fear of and fascination with Muslims and Asians. To this we can add a reification of forms and preoccupation with official processes, check-box exercises that give assurance and permanence to our self-regard as valuers of Heritage, which mere explosives will never shake.