Just who is being protected here?

The "protect and defend" trope, as deployed by the Morrison government, is capacious to say the least. You can basically fit anything into it. We have been variously assured we need to be protected from people seeking refuge, from terrorism (often spoken of in the same breath), and from anything or anyone deemed "un-Australian," whatever that means.

We apparently also need protection from those wanting to destroy our way of life by, horror of horrors, taking the climate emergency seriously.

Shamefully, we've often been told that, because they are reportedly out to rip us off, we need protection from people who are unemployed, people with a disability, sole parents and other carers, and students, which speaks volumes about who the "we" excludes, as well as providing a disgraceful argument for why people should be forced to live below the poverty line.

"We've" been told we need to be protected from women (none of whom, according to the government, were "credible") who raise their voices against gendered violence, including all forms of gendered inequality (for there is nothing nonviolent about deliberately structured inequality). Again, that "we" is exponentially shrinking.

"We", in this discursive frame, also need to be protected from First Nations peoples who don't realise how good Australia is, and who keep wanting to talk about dispossession, hyper-incarceration and deaths in custody, and who continue to demand action in response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The Morrison government has also made it clear, not least of all with its Ensuring Integrity and Industrial Relations Omnibus bills, that "we" need protection from workers who want to be paid decent wages (on the grounds that this is bad for profits and therefore bad for "the economy"). We ostensibly need protection from "double-dippers", from casualised workers entitled to permanent employment, and from workers who want such luxuries as sick leave, annual leave, domestic violence leave, and paid vaccination leave.

At regular intervals, the Morrison government therefore tries to tell us we actually need to be protected from unions, which it predictably paints as being despicable. This is quite telling, given that the union movement is simply the working class daring to organise itself collectively. Nothing scares the bejeezus out of the Morrison government, and the interests it represents, more than when the despised get organised.

Despite the malleability of the protection discourse, we do want to feel protected. But while the Morrison government is big on talking about protecting our borders, it has nothing constructive to say about protecting our lives or protecting our future.

If it cared about protecting our lives, it would not only have been more proactive in regards to our national public health crisis, but would also have ensured that, while profits in some quarters soared, ordinary people did not suffer. Protecting the economy does not mean protection of profits while throwing the rest of us under the bus.

It is striking how consistent the Prime Minister is in abrogating responsibility not only for the pandemic but for everything from the climate emergency, the subsequent Black Summer bushfires, gendered violence, First Nations deaths in custody, chronic wage stagnation, and the entrenchment of insecure work, with one in four workers now being classified as casuals.

We have all paid the price for his lack of leadership during the current crisis. Despite the mess he has made of protecting the community, we can reasonably anticipate that, come the election, we will be in a much better position as far as vaccination rates are concerned - arguably a position we would already be in had he provided effective national quarantining and the competent provision of vaccines.

It is clear, though, that the Prime Minister is more interested in protecting his prime ministership than protecting the people, or - to put it more democratically - in ensuring that the people have the power and the means to protect ourselves and each other.

Defending the nation is not just about what happens at our borders. If our national government treated social infrastructure as the means of defence that, in truth, it is, then perhaps it would not be so grudging in the way it is resourced. As with past crises and disasters, members of our armed forces have assisted the community during the bushfire crisis and the current Covid crisis. But the "boots on the ground" we need, not only during a crisis but to avert future crises, are not just the "boots" of the armed forces. We need to similarly value, respect and resource the other workers - paid and unpaid - who offer us a defence against that which can harm us, denude us, or prevent us and those we love from having a fair crack at happiness.

The highly gendered work of caring, for a start - much of which is low-paid if not unpaid - is a work of protection and defence. Teachers, nurses and other health workers, social services and community workers, are all similarly engaged in defending our lives, our humanity, our right to happiness. It is hard to live, and impossible to thrive, if we do not have a place to live, a place to work (or income security if we cannot work), a place to learn, and a place to heal.

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Beyond these obvious areas of community and public service, has Covid not taught us the profound importance to our lives of other essential workers? From transport workers to cleaners, from shelf-stackers to checkout assistants, from food industry workers to the workers who keep the lights on in our homes and the water running from our taps, have we not been given a crash course in how these workers help us protect ourselves? Have we not seen how insecure and low-paid many of these essential jobs are? We know, especially in the light of the pandemic, that secure jobs are worth fighting for. It is hard to understand how a government that says it is on the side of the people should deliberately not join us in this fight.

The recent statements by the Prime Minister on "embracing", rather than fearing, the removal of restrictions while COVID-19 is still present in the community, are deeply concerning from a health perspective. What lies beneath this quasi-Trumpist discourse, however, is a political strategy that he thinks will get him over the line at the next election.

We know what the Prime Minister is up to right now. He is setting the stage for an election in which he will blame state and territory leaders for whatever is wrong in our lives, having taken no responsibility himself for what was squarely within his remit to do, from providing and securing quarantine facilities and a timely vaccine rollout to ensuring people's jobs and incomes were secure. What he has done consistently is to build and bolster the neoliberal framework that protects and enhances the profits of those who already have much - at the expense of those who have, or are at risk of having, not nearly enough.

Morrison is preparing to designate the states and territories where lockdowns continue to be necessary as "zones of chaos", to use the words so loved by his mentor, John Howard, who introduced this phrase in a 2006 speech that served as a prelude to the degrading and disempowering Northern Territory Intervention.

The metaphor is both powerful and provocative. It bespeaks the strategic assumption of a national or global order endangered by the exceptions to this order. Morrison intends to paint the states and territory governments as presiding over "zones of chaos" from which only his re-election can save us.

Hence his recent references to "the deal" made with the Australian people as the framing for how his government is tackling Covid. At times he has referred to it as a "new deal", but we know there is nothing new about a vague wish and a prayer that "this too shall pass".

The bottom line is this: deal or no deal, the Morrison government has not protected us.