When COVID-19 first emerged in Australia there was a sense of togetherness and camaraderie, with random acts of kindness across the country and front-page “thank you” messages to healthcare workers.
But our sense of social cohesion was not universal — Asian Australians saw an uptick in race-based harassment between lockdowns — and ultimately short-lived. This year’s Mapping Social Cohesion study, produced by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, found social cohesion is at a “critical juncture”, being eroded by social and economic inequalities, discrimination, and concern about national and global issues including climate anxiety and financial pressures.
Some children have lost social skills and the ability to manage conflict; retail workers report ongoing abuse amid workforce shortages; hospitality workers say customers are short-tempered and demanding.
It seems the pandemic has made our fuses shorter and challenged our sociability. Has COVID-19 changed the way Australians treat each other for good?
Escalating abuse in hospitality
Measuring social inclusion and justice, acceptance and rejection, a sense of worth and a sense of belonging, the Mapping Social Cohesion study found that while there was a boost in cohesion across COVID-19 and particularly across lockdowns, it’s now dropped to below pre-pandemic levels. Our sense of national pride, belonging, and social justice have all declined, and are now at their lowest levels since 2007.
Kiara, who requested her surname and the name of her employer be withheld, is a bartender in a major casino. She says that since hospitality venues got back into full swing, abuse on the job has gotten worse.
“[Behaviour] has really changed to demanding and abusive. I often find that customers just have no time,” she told Crikey.
She thinks that because people were their own bartenders at home and are used to only hanging out with friends, they’ve forgotten how to treat workers with respect.
“There’s definitely been a change in the way that customers act but also the way that they see workers.”
Instead of accepting workers’ need to enforce responsible serving of alcohol rules, she said many customers will become abusive and try to fight the bartender’s decision. She’s noticed if a few customers are demanding, rude or abusive, others will follow suit.
Kiara said workers are short-tempered too. As in many industries, there’s a worker shortage, with many people who have never worked in hospitality before entering the scene.
“Everybody has got shorter fuses and nobody wants to be abused and nobody wants to be told no. And when you get those two people meeting, there’s a clash,” she said.
But, she added, customers who don’t like a worker’s behaviour can escalate it up to the chain or complain to the venue. For workers who experience low-level abuse, there’s little recourse.
One University of Queensland study, published in September, found 60% of hospitality workers surveyed across the summer of 2021 and 2022 experienced bullying or sexual harassment — mostly perpetrated by customers. Seventy-seven per cent said they felt burnt out from their work, with nearly 10% saying they were unlikely to return to hospitality work in the near future.
It’s a similar story in the retail sector. Distributive and Allied Employees Association secretary Bernie Smith said staff were still experiencing unacceptable levels of abuse.
From the start of the COVID-19 crisis they were exposed to abusive customer behaviour (such as customers brawling over toilet paper): 56% of respondents of a study by the Australian National University and University of Sydney Business School reported a notable increase in customer abuse across the pandemic.
“We’re not seeing the level of abuse go down,” Smith told Crikey. “Across the past two years, 85% of our members said they experienced verbal abuse and 16% to 18% experienced physical abuse.”
Smith said some of the abuse was due to customers lashing out over staff shortages, but the main issue was the normalisation of abuse and the lack of consequences. Abuse against retail workers, despite those workers being labelled “essential” across the pandemic, isn’t prosecuted as severely as abuse against police, medical or education staff, he said.
But it’s not all terrible news, with Smith noting that abusive customers were often drowned out by customers who showed appreciation by bringing cakes, coffees and letters to retail workers to thank them for their work.
Kids have lost conflict management skills
It’s not just adults who are struggling with social skills — it’s children too. Schools have been shown to play an important role in preventing, treating and managing anxiety and depression in those aged 12 to 24.
Birralee Primary School assistant principal Tanya Burton told Crikey a notable difference she’d noticed in children before and after the pandemic was their lack of resilience and independence.
Learning remotely with their parents by their side, they got used to being handed a pencil or their book being turned to the right page for them. So when school returned, some children were “having a meltdown because they couldn’t find their pencil” or because they didn’t “understand the routine of going to an assembly and sitting and listening for half an hour”.
She’s seen both primary and high school students struggle with conflict management — from an inability to compromise on what game to play, to not being able to shrug off and walk away from a conversation. Normally, she said, teachers would intervene and help kids come to a resolution.
“Usually by the time they get to grade two, there are not many of those issues happening because we’ve had lots of coaching and conversations [from teachers] about that,” Burton said.
“We were finding that across the whole school, these little issues were becoming big because kids had either forgotten or had no idea how to resolve little conflicts.”
One US-based study found children who weren’t able to exercise or socialise outside their home during COVID-19 were “more clingy, attention seeking and more dependent on their parents”, while another UK-based study found the proportion of two-year-olds who developed personal-social, problem-solving and communication skills as expected had decreased by up to three percentage points following the pandemic.
Fortunately, Burton notes, kids are adaptable and are relearning social skills, and things seem to be returning to normal. Parents, she added, have been involved in school community events and have a new appreciation for teachers’ jobs.
“The overwhelming thing is kids are just so happy to be back at school,” Burton said.
Anxiety on top of anxiety
COVID-19 took a major toll on the nation’s mental health. Across August 2022 there was an 11% increase in medicare-subsidised mental health services compared to the same period in 2019, with Australians experiencing lower levels of well-being and higher levels of psychological distress across the pandemic.
UNSW associate professor in psychology Lisa Williams told Crikey that large events like COVID-19 are collective traumatic events requiring emotional regulation skills. When these skills are taxed, we get less good at using them.
“If somebody continues to be quite stressed and anxious, especially around COVID-19 but due to a lot of other world events, it would be no surprise to me if folks are finding more difficulty in regulating emotions, which would lead to … a short fuse,” she said.
We rely on others to help us regulate our emotions, she said — meaning periods of lockdown and isolation limited our ability to do so. While research has found we’re becoming less negative as the pandemic eases, Williams stressed current research is retrospective and wouldn’t reflect current world views.
“I’m not sure ‘it’s all back to normal’ is quite the right take,” Williams said.
Have Australians become less reasonable in public since the pandemic started? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
