Both volumes are frank about their political orientation: University of Melbourne historian Janet McCalman notes that What Happens Next? had its genesis in 2019, during discussions with former federal Labor politician John Langmore about the climate crisis and inequality in Australia and internationally. Her co-editor, Emma Dawson, is executive director of the progressive think tank Per Capita and a former policy adviser to the Rudd and Gillard governments. Tanya Plibersek, editor of Upturn: A better normal after Covid-19, is the federal shadow minister for education and a former deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party. Her writers include a cavalcade of Labor thinkers.

In an ideal world, both books, bristling with ideas for the post-Covid repair and regeneration of Australia’s torn social, economic, and physical fabric, would be received and read as valuable, challenging contributions to a concerted national debate about ‘where next?’ Indeed, some contributors, like former South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill, clearly had that expectation. In his essay in What Happens Next? he wrote: ‘Our public institutions are working together to deal with an unprecedented challenge in new and effective ways. Federal and state leaders are working together through the National Cabinet process. Disparate stakeholders, such as trade unions and business groups, are being given real input into critical decisions.’

The temptation to respond with ‘that was then’ is strong. But I write this review one day after the US President Elect named action on both Covid and climate as national priorities, and was frank and brave enough to acknowledge that racial, social, and economic inequalities also plague America, as they do Australia. There is nothing so corrosive as cynicism, nothing as stifling as ideological silos, so perhaps one should take these two books at face value – as ideas offered in good faith by serious, informed Australians – and argue about them, setting them alongside whatever else is to come from other possibly contending sources. And stay open-minded, as does ACTU Secretary Sally McManus, in this instance: ‘It’s fair to say I have been surprised that the government has engaged as constructively with us as they have. In working with Attorney-General Christian Porter, we have both been focused on the practical, what has to be done and what needs to be done.’

In offering ideas about ‘what needs to be done’, most of the essayists write out of their specific areas of expertise, if sometimes with a degree of predictability – sticking to their lasts (more so in the Plibersek volume). But there are others whose wisdom, bred of long experience, licenses broader public policy theorising. Fiona Stanley and Kate Lycett, for example, in drawing on their paediatric and epidemiological knowledge (‘The health and wellbeing of future generations’ in What Happens Next?), posit causal connections between health and equality, between public health and public trust, especially in the institutions to which we turn during health crises. Their conclusion:

After World War II, a social-democratic consensus prevailed that built publicly funded health and welfare services in many countries. But this was undone in the late 1980s with the wave of privatisation that characterised the neo-liberal age …

The neo-liberal agenda successfully constructed a narrative portraying the public sector as weak and a drain on society. This infiltrated our social architecture, damaging our society and services such as health, child care, disability and vocational education as they were increasingly outsourced to for-profit organisations.

Stanley and Lycett expand their demand for post-Covid equality in health and social policy into a demand for equality for Indigenous Australians; they endorse the idea of giving them voice and agency through implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Stanley, in public conversations after the book’s publication, addressed the evident effectiveness of self-directed Indigenous policy, citing as a model the outstanding (if unsung) success of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, under its CEO, Pat Turner, in keeping Aboriginal communities safe from Covid-19. Stanley comments: ‘Our First Nations have managed this better than anywhere else in the world.’ The contrast with the devastation in Native American Navajo communities could not be more marked.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart (The Uluru Statement)

Both volumes work from the premise that a ‘snapback’ to pre-pandemic life is neither possible nor an adequate response. As McCalman contends, ‘Public health recognises that the individual is only safe if the society is safe: that the health of one depends on the health of all. It is no different with global warming – like the virus, the climate emergency threatens everyone.’ Plibersek chooses to frame the crisis as an opportunity, ‘a portal’, quoting Indian writer Arundhati Roy:

Historically, pandemics have forced human beings to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, and data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Both volumes link social and economic equality with racial justice and environmental responsibility. McCalman, in her introduction, explains the specifically Australian nature – and hope – implicit in the linkage: ‘The book begins with an invocation from Thomas Mayor of the promise of the Uluru Statement from the Heart – a gift to the nation of reconciliation, a just rebuilding through a Makarrata. Such a reconciliation between First Nations and settler Australia could also lead to the healing of the land and of society, teach us how to form partnerships instead of factions, and find consensus in place of conflict. This is, we hope, what will happen next.’

McCalman is a distinguished historian of global health and an adept at communication. Her own books (including Struggletown [1984], a classic of Australian social history) speak to a broad audience, so it is not surprising that the essays she has commissioned, with Dawson, should look to historical precedents for reconstruction and be written in crisp, accessible prose. Through McCalman, John Langmore, Jenny Macklin, Jim Chalmers, Anthony Albanese, and Andrew Leigh, we glean a historical perspective on the building blocks of post-World War II recovery: Dr H.C. Coombs’s 1945 white paper, Full Employment in Australia, and government reconstruction initiatives under Prime Ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley. If you are a connoisseur of ironies, you will notice on the list, alongside car manufacture, air travel, and the Snowy Mountains scheme, the establishment of the Australian National University and the funding of Australian research as an essential component of a prosperous, forward-looking nation. Autre temps …

Other historical reforms analysed in both books for precedent and inspiration include the Hawke government’s 1983 Accord and National Economic Summit, and the Rudd government’s response to the global financial crisis. As these initiatives recede in time, they can begin to look to the general public like iterations of political ‘business as usual’. Jenny Macklin, who was there, inserts a salutary reminder: ‘I haven’t forgotten how hotly contested the reforms of the Hawke–Keating era were. But one of the lessons of those years is that although good policy is never inevitable, it is always possible.’

The policy reforms that Macklin advocates in both her essays (she is the only writer included in both volumes) cover employment, equality, and climate change action – a new kind of accord. Macklin is refreshingly practical and humane about the tug of war between employment and climate priorities: ‘The reality is that you cannot expect the Steves [a Queensland coalminer interviewed post the 2019 federal election] of the world to support climate change action unless you show them a way out that doesn’t end in poverty. Unless we give people like Steve a path to sustainable prosperity, we are, in effect, telling them their pain and suffering are for the greater good; and that kind of austerity-speak – and the contempt it often masks – didn’t work in Europe and the United States during the global financial crisis and it won’t work here. We have to give people a reason to trust change ’ [my emphasis].

Both books are good on the specifics that might give Australians a reason to trust change: there is Ross Garnaut with his proposals for employment in an Australia that harnesses its potential as an alternative energy superpower; Kim Williams and Cate Blanchett on the cultural and financial contribution of the arts and artists to Australia (‘more than $111.7 billion, or 6.4 per cent of Australia’s GDP’); Gareth Evans on enhanced global engagement for Australia (even more important given Joe Biden’s election); and former Chief Scientist Ian Chubb on differentiating our economy (not just because China will force us to), and exploiting the current renewal of trust in science and expertise generally in Australia – a good comparative advantage to secure.

We have a chance now, in this country. The Southern Hemisphere spring is easing into a summer that looks less threatening than the last. We have learned how to live together and look after one another. We have cultural and historical precedents to guide us, intellectual and physical resources to sustain us, and the future of our children to protect. So we have no excuse: we must read, think, and then act in ways that might just make us international exemplars.