The power to choose our future
If not coronavirus, it would have been something else. Dealing with the three great challenges starts with every child, says John Burgess
IT’S a timeless story, birth, growth, peak and decline echoing across our past, present, and future. Only the scale differs — universe, species, civilisation, institutions, and human life itself. To seek to understand, modify, control and ultimately to defy how this story plays out in our lives and the world is the essence of our humanity. It is also central to maintaining optimism.
At times, our optimism is tested, our belief in potential and progress towards better things is challenged. Times of crisis test this capacity to see the path to an optimistic future. We face three great interlocking challenges — the pandemic, the risk of environmental degradation and the need for socio-economic fairness.
Before COVID-19, we lived and consumed like there was no tomorrow. The signs were there for all to see. The concept of growth as a necessity was fundamental to our economic, political and cultural model. Despite living on a finite planet with finite physical and biological resources, we faced a Ponzi scheme of growth and rapacious consumption. Then came our wakeup call.
As we struggle to understand our changed circumstances, we may be drawn to think the old way is a normal to which we must return. Think again. If not the coronavirus wakeup call it would have been something else, something potentially more devastating — catastrophic environmental damage, ecosystem collapse, irreversible economic decline, societal instability, and conflict — take your pick. They were all in play.
Of course, it is easy and tempting to paint a bleak picture and for some to lose hope. Let’s not do this. Dystopian futures based on climate, economic and societal failure can be envisaged but need to be rejected — not out of ignorance, naivete or complacency, but because we have the capacity to take charge of our destiny.
If COVID was the least worst disaster for humanity, then it’s giving us a chance to reflect and to consider how we might emerge into a sustainable normal where growth is redefined within a frame of sustainability for the natural world, the economy and every member of our community. Let’s reimagine a normal where healthy and meaningful human existence is fundamental. As a Tasmanian community we are smart and adaptable enough to forge this path. We have an opportunity now.
Let’s start by allowing every child to grow in fulfilment of their interests and abilities. Good nutrition and maternal support during pregnancy, stable and safe families during childhood, solid foundations for literacy and the opportunity for successful school participation and engagement. These things will lead to optimal educational outcomes, maximal employment opportunity, improved health, enhanced quality of life and life expectancy.
So how do we turn theory and ideals into reality? Let’s do it by practical actions beginning by directly taking on the challenge of closing the 19-year life expectancy gap that exists between the least and most disadvantaged suburbs in Tasmanian cities. Strategies that close this gap can be generalised and of benefit to our entire community. Lives and livelihoods, health, and economics are two sides of the same coin. We can use an evidence-based approach and holistic policy to break the cycles of intergenerational disadvantage. Steps that can be taken include: TAKE the time to consider the impact on health and wellbeing in all new policies in all portfolios. This is an evidence-based approach supported by international experience. No single portfolio can deliver this. It cuts across all, particularly health, education, justice, police and community services.
FOCUS resources and support on ensuring an optimal start to life in the critical period from the first 1000 days of life to the first day of school. This would provide a conception to age four basis for establishing the health, language, literacy and socialisation foundations that children need to perform at their optimum when entering our school system.
ENSURE our education system has an endpoint in contemporary, job-ready vocational and academic pathways. This is every Tasmanian’s ticket out of poverty and entrenched disadvantage, through employment, community participation and wellbeing. AVOID reliance on economic models heavily dependent on growth in consumption, growth in tourism and growth in population. The COVID-19 impact on the growth model for tourism, hospitality and education sectors has been profound, is likely to be ongoing, and should teach us that such growth-dependent models leave us highly vulnerable. PEOPLE need economic support and the opportunity for meaningful employment. As suggested by activists Pat Turner and Noel Pearson when commenting on Indigenous disadvantage, we might consider a job guarantee. This is a starting point for reprofiling our economy based on what can be our enduring strengths in education, healthcare, primary production, manufacturing and value-added, sustainable tourism.
The immediate impact of the COVID crisis has seen people face changes and diminished opportunities, declining employment prospects, disruption to ways of working, socialising and relating to family and community, all of which produce profound challenges to mental and physical health.
As Professor Amit Sood, Chair of Mayo Mind Body Initiative at the Mayo Clinic recommends, in times of stress, resilience and support to our mental health comes from affiliative activities that positively join us together with family, friends and community; by focusing on factors that reduce fear and outrage at external events; through seeking opportunities to cultivate our sense of gratitude, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance. In these challenging times it is worth us all reflecting on a quote attributed to Holocaust concentration camp survivor, neurologist, and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”