We are in Crisis – the sort of nation-defining crisis Asimov wrote of in Foundation, and it’s not hard to imagine the National Cabinet gathered in the vault like so many Encyclopedists and stunned into silence by the scenario that awaits them.

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This time, Seldon cannot be Cassandra – our leaders must listen to the expert advice and act, fast. It is fundamentally important, however, not to panic, and not to overstate the gravity of what confronts us in our response: not the seriousness of the pandemic itself, which is unprecedented in our lifetimes and of the direst concern, but rather the strength of the institutions we have to confront it. The needless and embarrassingly parochial fearmongering of some of Australia’s self-anointed pundits about the state of our institutions was uncalled for in the past, and is now borderline intolerable. Australia’s institutions may have flaws, at times serious ones – a non-existent national integrity commission leading to illegal porkbarrelling, the lack of proper Indigenous representation, and the independence of our security agencies from the minister to name three – but we are not the United States. Our judiciary is apolitical. Our elections are frequent, universal, compulsory, and not subject to either partisan gerrymandering or racist voter suppression. Nor are we the UK. We do not hold future-defining questions hostage to turnout. We have preferential voting, rather than fabricating non-existent majorities out of first-past-the-post. And we have a powerful, elected Upper House and a written Constitution, depriving those in government of undemocratically excessive power.

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The editor of the Guardian Australia, Lenore Taylor – and I am not usually one to object to the Guardian – wrote this morning (22/03) in the context of the pandemic that “A deeply polarised country needs to trust and stick with a plan.” She is right to suggest this shouldn’t stand in the way of criticizing the Government – powerfully right, especially in the context of Australian journalism’s tenuous relationship with those in power, one of the few points about our institutions of serious concern. But Australia is not a deeply polarized country, and to suggest we are says more about how frequently some day-to-day political obsessives, rather than our politicians per se, have a chance to look up from their laptops. Just to the Anglosphere will do. The American example is the most instructive for a truly divided population who almost seem to inhabit different planes, and certainly imbibe chilling different versions of the truth, though anyone worried about Australia’s institutions would do well to look at a country that essentially elects a dictator every five years, rubber-stamped by a virtually powerless parliament, and whose constitution leading political scientists don’t expect to survive the decade – that is, France.

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The issue with our democracy is not our democracy itself – the issue is simply the people currently in power (and we would do well to remember that “in power” doesn’t just mean in Parliament, but actually able to exercise the levers of the executive). Australia has not failed to do anything about climate change, the next planet-girdling crisis for which the present one is serving as a half-hearted dress rehearsal – the Liberal Party has. When Labor was last in government, Australia had a carbon price. We were also the only major developed country to avoid the GFC, a minor miracle that should dispel any grubby fears that the ALP can’t manage money, especially as Frydenberg is about to preside over our first recession in two decades. Good government is not forever structurally out of our grasp, and in assuming the shocks of 2016 in the US and UK equally represent the situation here we are more provincial than we occasionally like to think. Government is not the problem, the current party in government is. This is a much more serious concern – why are people, in Australia and elsewhere, voting for a party whose methods and incompetent vulgarity are so evident we’ve begun projecting them onto an entire system?

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In this, as in many things, the current crisis is all of a sudden throwing everything into gratifyingly stark relief. The issue is that, since the GFC, governments have not been acting. This political rigor mortis has pervaded the United States and Europe, the UK included; Australia had to wait until 2013 to begin entering the same malaise but, until as little as two weeks ago, the myopic disinterest of people like the Prime Minister in actually governing was approaching Menzies-like proportions. The near-collapse of capitalism showed that self-regulating profiteers making obscene amounts of money at the pace of Crassus and being about as ethical in doing so not only existed, but existed as a direct result of right-of-centre politicians who gave them unfettered and indefensible access to society’s common wealth and actively facilitated them to profit from other people’s misery. This understandably has provoked some anger, to put it mildly, but governments in the West have done their best to make it seem insoluble, following the same line as the Treasurer a few days ago: praising businesses in times of planetary crisis for the tiniest steps towards ethicality as though they lacked the power to legislate these evils out of existence.

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What we are seeing – a collapse of trust in Western institutions, the justifiable radicalization of an entire generation, dangerous flirtation with the extreme right – is a result of inaction and austerity, pure and simple. It began in Australia with Hockey’s laughably terrible 2014 Budget, which would be comical for its sheer political inadvisability if the number of deaths from its cuts to essential services didn’t rather macabrely freeze the incipient grin. People are voting for the Liberals because they have forgotten that Government can help them. That people in power can make their constituents’ lives better has today become a foreign concept, in the space, before the last election, of a mere six years. Austerity leads to fear for survival, and fear leads to people clamouring for security, and whatever economic strongmen are promising it. That is why something good, at least, may come out of what is easily the most frightening time in Australia since 1942 – governments are finally acting. Perhaps because this is a health crisis and only secondarily an economic one, or because it’s an elemental threat like the bushfires but one which Australia wasn’t laconically expecting, but for a Liberal Government that has spent the last seven years blaming every conceivable instance of their own misgovernment on Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd to legislate sweeping economic stimulus is so brazen it’s almost refreshing, if the gall weren’t enough to make you sick. The miracle of a government finally doing something is that finally, because of an Australian Federal Government, fewer people may actually lose their jobs, fewer people receive insufficient welfare, and fewer people die for the crime of being vulnerable and poor: the miracle of social democracy, and human compassion.

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But this is only the barest of first steps. Ineffably more exciting is the decision by the Andrews Government to announce that the Victorian State Government will directly hire workers who’ve lost their job in the pandemic. As I said on Facebook at the time – it worked for Roosevelt, it’ll work now. This is why we elect Governments that aren’t afraid to intervene. When Destiny comes knocking, in the words of French President Emmanuel Macron when he stood, sombre-faced, in the Élysée to announce that his nation was all but shutting down, we need people in power who are willing to act, who know that paralysis – as in the United States, with 24,000 cases and climbing – would be the only thing worse than getting it wrong. This is a time for unity, for camaraderie, and, yes, for stepping back from the fray and letting governments of every stripe do what must be done. But above all, it is not a time to be complacent. This is a time for action – and I am proud and relieved beyond belief that Australia hasn’t forgotten it.