Aprofound feeling of guilt pervades Canberra this week. It arises from a wondering of how and why we could have been led to take part in the events of Sunday. And take part we did, just by being there to watch.
We now have a knowledge that, for a long time to come, every time we cross Commonwealth Avenue the beauty of the scene will be tainted.
The guilt is compounded. Every parent who took a child to the lake of Sunday feels they could have been endangering their child.
As we went to the lake on Sunday carried with us emotional memories of days when the hospital was a hospital: of birth and death and fear and hope. When emotion is high, memory is more highly tuned. Indeed, there is bio-medical research on this suggesting that high emotion causes chemical changes in the brain that help weld in memory.
We had a juxtaposition of high emotion and the lure of the carnival created by the centres of power in the community — especially government and media. When it went wrong, in the hearts and minds of ordinary people (at least those I have spoken to) there was bound to be a compelling reaction to this cocktail that demands to see it resolved. The promise of a carnival had yielded tragedy and guilt.
The guilt is greater because tragedy resulted from a string of causation which was almost entirely human action and much of which was political action. People feel guilty enough after act-of-god deaths they are associated with. When they participate in an almost entirely human-created event, they feel that much more guilty.
And because Sunday’s events occurred at a time of moderately high emotion created by our recalling of events associated with the hospital, the imprint will remain long in our memory and the demand for a resolution of the conflict between carnival and tragedy will be that much more powerful.
One of the easiest forms of resolution is to cast blame. But blame without explanation is only satisfactory in the short term. To place blame satisfactorily we need to know the full details of the chain of causation.
As it is, the chain is incomplete. And how far do we go back?
Say we go back to the time when Canberra Hospital was an ordinary functioning hospital in Canberra and go through to Sunday at 1.45pm.
The decisions in the chain are as follows.
BLOBS: The political and bureaucratic decision to build Woden Valley Hospital which ultimately undermined Canberra Hospital’s viability. There is some suggestion that, though started earlier, it was pushed by the Whitlam Government in the hope of achieving a guinea pig hospital full of salaried doctors. But this goes back too far. None the less it starts the chain.
The political and medical conclusion that Canberra should have only one public hospital because that was the only way in the 1990s to maintain the critical mass to support the full range of medical services and a clinical school.
The political and financial decision to close Canberra Hospital. This was greeted with outrage and high emotion. The process, combined with the upgrade at Woden, was drawn out. It became a running sore. And remained a running sore for more than half a decade as the building sat empty, unused and in a publicly prominent position.
Now we come closer to the events of Sunday.
The political decision to swap Acton peninsula with the Federal Government for Kingston lakeshore and the concomitant decision to clear the Acton site.
The decision to use an implosion technique to demolish the hospital tower block and Sylvia Curley House. This one is critical. At present we have to assume that it was purely a technical, cost and convenience decision. If, however, political considerations are shown to have influenced the decision in any way, Kate Carnell and the minority Liberal Government will be in desperate trouble.
The political decision to make a public spectacle of the implosion. Mrs Carnell is somewhat vulnerable on this count, but there are some defences.
The failure of the safety precautions of the implosion, whether by human fault or unforeseeable circumstance.
(END BLOBS)
Let’s go back to the last three points.
Mrs Carnell has engaged in spectacle politics since before coming to office as Chief Minister. She has associated herself with spectacles. The corollary is that if a spectacle goes wrong she can expect to be associated with it going wrong, however irrational or unfounded the association might be. For many people that has been enough to condemn her.
But in the context of heavy cutbacks from the federal government, even before John Howard came to power, Canberra has needed a fillip. It has needed someone to go out an energetically sell the place rather than hoping for some public-sector salvation which will never come. To that extent others will not be so condemnatory out of hand, but be more willing to concentrate on the failure of the implosion itself, whether a human engineering fault or some unforeseen element.
They might feel that if you have to level the site and implosion is the cheapest and most convenient way, then why not involve the whole Canberra community.
This group, judging by letters and talk-back, has probably expanded considerably in the past 36 hours with the entry into the debate of George Wason of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. He accused Mrs Carnell of pushing for an implosion as political grandstanding against safer, cheaper methods.
His timing was appalling. Many have seen it as political point-scoring on the back of an appalling tragedy. Indeed, Wason appears to have done exactly the opposite of his intention. He has taken some pressure from Mrs Carnell.
The point of this background is to show that the chain of events leading to Sunday’s tragedy are almost entirely of human making. Bizarrely, an inexplicable “”act of god” would not trouble us as much, at least those outside the immediately family.
The background shows also that the tragedy has a political context in the broadest sense. It means we all as participants and voters are involved.
Because of these things (and the force of them as explained at the beginning of this article), the demand for resolution is so high.
A lot of response is bound to be irrational; it is that sort of event. For example, imagine if Mrs Carnell herself had pressed the plunger. It would have made exactly no difference to the result, but the difference in response would have been decisive.
And a lot of reaction is going to be anti-Carnell anyway, for example, by the save-the-hospital group.
But the resolution for the middle ground will come after the inquiries. Unless they find some definite human failing or precise explanation on the engineering side, the resolution is bound to be political because there will be nowhere else for it to go. And in this context it demands resolution. People do not want to carry the guilt; they would prefer to pass it on.