Abandoned: voters face up to a world where governments can’t or won’t govern

No wonder Scott Morrison wants to talk only about submarine bases and national security and military spending all the way until election day. Morrison — the man who gave us “Operation Sovereign Borders” — thinks military force is usually a pretty good option.

After all, his one admission of failure in relation to the pandemic was his wish that he had placed the disastrous vaccine rollout under military control at the outset. And, with Peter Dutton, he overcame his reluctance to acknowledge the crisis in aged care and deployed Defence personnel as urged by both employers and unions — albeit very slowly and in small numbers.

Too slow and too small is the emerging theme of the ADF role in the combined federal-state response to the flood crisis in northern NSW too, which has prompted an apology from the major-general in charge of the operation.

In truth, though, the ADF should be playing only a support role to emergency and recovery institutions at the state level. And it’s clear that in NSW those institutions have failed — for the second major disaster in that state in a row. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, who looks badly rattled by the crisis, admitted as much this morning.

Communities have been left to look after themselves. Perrottet admitted that too: “Had neighbours not got in boats then I believe the death toll would have been much higher.”

If you’ve been caught up in a natural disaster of any kind, you may be familiar with the horrible fear that surfaces when you realise things are out of control and normal government emergency mechanisms to keep you safe aren’t going to be able to help.

It’s the realisation you’re on your own and no one is coming, at least not soon. It’s just you and your neighbours facing what’s heading your way, whether furnace-like wind from a bushfire or an incessant torrent of water.

Tens of thousands of people in northern NSW have lived with that feeling for days. Not minutes or hours, but days, stretching now into weeks.

Many people on the NSW south coast who still haven’t been able to rebuild their homes have been stuck with a similar sensation for two years. Forgotten, abandoned.

There are limits to what state agencies and emergency personnel can do in a crisis, of course, but people being left to themselves afterwards is a crime.

However, it’s all too familiar across the country. The vaccine rollout during the pandemic. The hundreds of deaths in aged care due to COVID. The persistent crisis in aged care that only seems to grow worse and worse. The failures of Closing the Gap. The failure to halt domestic violence and homicide. A sense that governments can’t, or won’t, address problems that cost lives and inflict misery.

And that’s before we get to high-level national issues where there is a complete and utter failure to govern — on climate, on energy, on Indigenous recognition.

The failure of the Morrison government to lead has repeatedly seen state governments take control — on the vaccination rollout, on climate policy, on energy — doing the job the federal government should do but won’t. But as the NSW flood crisis shows, the enfeeblement of government, the incapacity to provide the basic service of keeping citizens safe, isn’t a problem confined to Morrison.

The NSW government has shown strong leadership in areas like climate, energy and economic reform, but it can’t keep its citizens safe.

They’re on their own.

This is a new twist of a longstanding sense of alienation on the part of voters. Trust in governments began materially diminishing 20 years ago, and not just in Australia, but across the West. The sense that governments governed not for their citizens but for vested interests, grew and was dramatically accelerated by the financial crisis.

Years of wage stagnation and the emergence of a class of tech billionaires did nothing to allay voter concerns that governments didn’t have their interests at heart. Even in countries that handled the pandemic well, that handling transformed many people into outright conspiracy theorists convinced their governments were plotting against them.

The grim truth on offer in towns in wrecked, mud-filled northern NSW is not that governments work against their citizens, but that they don’t work at all, that the only people who’ve got your back when disaster comes are your family, your friends and your community.

It’s a painful and traumatic realisation. What political fruit it will bear in coming years isn’t yet clear. We’ve all talked for years about the need to rebuild social capital and community cohesion. But we rely on, and pay, governments to keep us safe. And Morrison capering and gambolling on the national stage talking about nuclear submarines isn’t what most of us have in mind.