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Why democracies matter to public health?


Aotearoa New Zealand is celebrating this week the effectiveness of the policy measures taken by the leadership in curbing the spread of COVID19. Globally, and at home, the Prime Minister has been celebrated for her strong response that is grounded in compassion. Her social media presence, supplementing a sequence of strong public health measures reflect leadership anchored in empathy.

This does not however mean that the New Zealand public health response has not been criticized. Or that there can be no criticism of the New Zealand response.

For instance, a number of my Māori colleagues have said that we should not get carried away by the "Jacinda Magic," as CARE graduate student and researcher Christine Elers puts it. A number of my Māori students and community organizer colleagues have educated me about my own blinders that limit my ability to see the entrenched inequalities in the COVID19 response in New Zealand. They have challenged me, educated me, and invited me to dialogues that have served as the basis of continually revisiting the ways in which I understand New Zealand's public health response to COVID19 in relationship to the settler colonial project.

Friends in the activist community have largely praised the response although some of them have also raised vitally critical questions about whether the policies go far enough in addressing the structural inequalities that have been cultivated with years of neoliberal reforms. I was watching a dialogue with activist, politician, and intellectual Sue Bradford, who was raising vital points about universal basic income, housing, and the sorts of universal policies needed to respond to COVID19.

Many academic colleagues have issued strong critiques of the government resonse. One of my colleagues Dr. Sy Taffel reminded on his tweet the importance of remembering the neoliberal ideology that shapes NZ Labor. Another colleague Steve Elers has consistently been writing some strong opinion pieces critiquing the New Zealand response.

While I have been largely impressed with the New Zealand response and the leadership of the Prime Minister, these critiques make me pause. They make me interrogate my own ideological blindspots and invite me to rigorously engage with the question of effectiveness, what it means, and its interpretation in varied contexts. There are times these debates make me re-visit my own earlier interpretation.

This process of engaging in ongoing debate and auto-cririque is fundamental to a democracy. It ensures pluralism of ideas, opinions, conversations, and dialogues. It sustains creative spaces for reflexivity, for continually striving to do better. Reflexivity in our communities, political-economic systrems, and activist-academic spaces sustains, and more vitally, nourishes a culture of argumentation. Through open, honest, and transparent argumentation that engages evidence and actively creates spaces for community voices, public health responses are strengthened, attending to their limitations, ideological blindspots, and convenient narratives. 

In authoritarian regimes such as Singapore, it is this fundamental diversity of ideas that is largely missing, with a state machinery built on manufacturing consent through top down public relations, through ongoing policing, and through systematic colonization of spaces. 

The hegemonic control over media such as The Straits Times ensures that alternative opinions and critiques are silenced while the ruling ideology is recycled daily. 

State control over academia ensures that academics are largely missing from the conversation on Singapore's response to COVID19. Those that do participate are busy propping up the state PR, more as salesmen for contact tracing, Singapore's health care etc. The once in a while critique is rife with euphemisms that don't even scratch the surface of Singapore's authoritarian neoliberalism. Remaining in the comfortable spaces of Singapore academia translates into turning oneself into spokespersons for the state and its authoritarian excesses.

The activists that place their bodies on the line to draw attention to the severe failings of the Singapore model in its COVID19 response run the risk of being targeted, tarred, and even harassed with the draconian online falsehoods act introduced by the state under the premise of stopping the spread of "fake news." These activists quickly get projected as trouble makers, and campaigns are seeded for silencing their voices.

The systematic silencing of these activists and campaigns to tarr them as unpatriotic has contributed to a weak public health infrastructure that is unable to anticipate and address the deep structural faultlines that constitute Singapore's neoliberal economy.

Unfortunately, the "Singapore model" does little in terms of creating spaces for difference, for new ideas, and for creative solutions. In the midst of a pandemic, the severe weaknesses of such a monotheistic model become glaringly visible. Ironically even as these weaknesses become visible, any sustained critique from academia is missing.

At this point of the New Zealand response to COVID19, I feel lucky to live in a democracy that has effective leadership. More so however, I feel indebted to live in a democracy where diverse voices question my sense of comfort, and invite me to interrogate my own privileges.

Democracies, with the spaces for many critiques, commit to communication as dialogue, and not as monolithic propaganda to prop up the state. It is therefore at this point, where the COVID19 spread seems to have been controlled, that humility and openness become vital. Rather than celebrate or try to prop up some New Zealand model as cheap public relations ploy, now is the time to listen, to invite in difference,  and to engage in argumentation. The questions, "What have we done well?" "What did we not do well?" "What are our blindspots?" "What are the sites of erasure?" and "Which voices are we missing out?" are the ones that contribute to a robust public health system that continues to respond well to this pandemic and other crises in the future, the pace of which is likely to increase over the next decades. 

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