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/377/ The Locked-Up Country ft. Shahar Hameiri & Tom Chodor (Patreon)

Published:
2023-11-28 07:00:04
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

On Australia's lockdown.

We welcome back Shahar Hameiri and Tom Chodor to talk about their new book, The Locked-Up Country, to try to learn some lessons from Australia's response to Covid-19. We also talk about the country's recent Indigenous Voice referendum and ask whether it was Oz's "Brexit Moment". 

In the episode we ask:

Was the pandemic another success for the 'lucky country'?

How was the Australian state transformed from the 1970s to the 2020s?

Why was Australia's pandemic planning inadequate?

What was up with the hotel-based quarantines?

Why did the public largely support these measure?

And what can the rest of the world learn from the experience?

Files

Comments

Surface Envy

People will roll their eyes but I appreciate the determination by this podcast and other writers to now allow lockdown to be 'memory-holed' as they say.

Jack Barry

Thanks for more Australian content. It would have been interesting if Tom and Shahar related the issue of reduced state capacity back to the Voice to Parliament and speculated on the capacity of the proposed advisory body to e.g. Close the Gap (i.e. improve health outcomes for Indigenous Australians) if the referendum had have been successful.

Seb

Sorry to be a pain but what's the author's name of the book "Broken Promises"? The audio cuts out at just that time.

DaveB

It sounds like the 2022 floods in NSW might have been Australia’s “Katrina moment.” There have been a few similar incidents in the States since that disaster—Deepwater Horizon, Flint, Puerto Rico, East Palestine, Maui—and there will likely be more in the future. COVID is a worthwhile topic that should receive much more rearview-mirror attention, and I would be interested to hear Hameiri and Chodor talk about how the pandemic and the response to it played out in New Zealand.

Andrew Scerri

Thanks nice one, buying your book now!

Vico1725

Regarding Donald Horne and the ‘lucky country’. He didn’t simply use that phrase in the common sense of being fortunate or living in favourable conditions – although that is part of it – but in the context of Australia being a ‘derivative’ or ‘imitative’ culture, incapable of generating ideas or strategies on our own, to meet local conditions and problems, but to simply adopt idea or strategies from overseas, applying them (usually with little or no modification) to the local situation – ignoring when they don’t work, and patting ourselves on the back when they do work (i.e. being lucky). Rinse and repeat. Horne wrote over 20 books and tirelessly organised many public conventions and conferences, producing many edited books of ideas. But people only tend to refer back to that first book, “The Lucky Country” (1964). But his other works and ideas may also be of interest: in the 70s he wrote a social history of Australia from the point of view of money, showing how Australia has always, from colonial times onward, been a managed economy, an extractive economy, for the benefit of various overseas interests (from Great Britain initially, through to United States, and then Asia), and to the detriment of local political culture. In the 1980s, he was out of step with the neoliberal turn (which this podcast episode outlined), arguing instead for a political and public culture to be given precedence over simply subordinating the state to economic polices (especially as ones derived from overseas). There was recently an intellectual biography published of Horne: https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/donald-horne-0 And I’d suggest getting his biographer on the pod for a broader discussion of this fascinating intellectual figure.