There’s a lot of movement at the moment around questions of rebuilding after COVID (assuming there is an ‘after COVID’; I think this is with us for a while) especially in what is sometimes referred to as the “foundation economy” (health, social care, education, food - what Sydney University’s John Buchanan recently described as the “economy of everyday life”) or in care and caring more broadly. The story goes that COVID has peeled back the lid, so to speak, to reveal a set of conditions and circumstances about the way we care, and the way we think about care, that suggest things are at one at the same time impressively resilient and dangerously fragile. It’s not that COVID19 is the cause, so much as a brute catalyst that has brought into sharp and uncomfortable relief the precarious state of our framing, ethic and practice of care throughout society and the economy. I was at the recent Australia Together Summit, put together by many including Michael Hogan, Matthew Cox and Tim Reddell, and had occasion to throw a question into the chat channel (aren’t we all getting good at having multiple meetings with the chat function?): why is it so hard to do what we know? What does that mean? For me, it means we’ve reached a stage where, for most of the big social and care challenges we face - disability, aged care, juvenile justice, mental health, child protection and …
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