This article was originally published in the Australian Financial Review and is republished with permission.
For giving aid unquestioningly to those who need it, for its charismatic and bombastic founder Kon Karapanagiotidis, and for its denunciation of the politics of division, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre is one of Melbourne’s most iconic charities. But even it is not immune from Victoria’s psychic dislocation.
In 2019, according to Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission records, it had 1227 volunteers. In its most recent disclosures to the charities regulator, filed in January this year, it had 491.
In the pandemic, people were “disconnected”, says the centre’s deputy chief executive, Jana Favero. And after it concluded, little was the same.
“The cost of living went up. Students who had volunteered took an extra shift [of paid work] instead. Retirees prioritised looking after their grandkids. We definitely saw a decrease in volunteers,” she tells AFR Weekend. And while volunteering has ticked up steadily since, it has, five years later, yet to recover to its pre-pandemic highs.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre isn’t alone. The pattern repeats over and over again in Victorian charities, and in the aggregate numbers of volunteers in the state, which remain lower than anywhere else in the country – 58 per cent of Victorians have volunteered formally or informally over the past year, compared with 64.3 per cent nationally, according to a recent report from Volunteering Victoria.
Volunteering is of keen interest to political scientists because it is regarded as a robust measure of how warmly people feel towards their fellow citizens. Money can be given for a multitude of reasons. But the giving of one’s time and presence is a marker of respect and shared community feeling, extended to those who are different from us. It goes up when a community is united, when we feel a sense of responsibility towards more than our immediate clan. It plunges in times of division.
Volunteering figures aren’t the only things in the southern capital to show the clear effects of the pandemic. As Victoria heads to the polls, the after-effects of the state’s 260 or so days in lockdown are the election’s great sleeper issue. The pandemic marks the beginning of when Victoria’s economic resilience slipped.
In 2026, the state’s youth unemployment rate hit 13.2 per cent, compared with 10.9 per cent nationally. More people still work from home in Victoria than in any other state, a development that, while benign on its face, spurred a remodelling of the consumer economy while adding to the social isolation and lack of connection now plaguing many an office worker.
Businesses with a national profile regularly single out their Victorian divisions in presentations to investors as a little weaker, a little slower, a little (or a lot) more crime-plagued. At the end of 2025, retail offences in the state were some 63 per cent above their level in 2022, according to the Australian Retail Council, while the Insurance Council of Australia says claims for car thefts in Victoria cost its members more than those in all the other states combined. Businesses taxes have surged even as the government deficit did: it is now projected to reach $200 billion by 2030.
“For many people, COVID was a time when people say it was before and after,” says Dr Zena Burgess, CEO of the Australian Psychological Society. “Concerns about their children’s education, social networks, their business or employment ... they became conversations during COVID. And for many people, they’ve never gone away.”
At a population level, things are far from disastrous. Victoria was a relatively resilient state before the pandemic and remains so today. Many mental health and educational statistics showed remarkable population-level improvement as soon as the lockdowns lifted in 2021. But still, ask any Victorian about their pandemic experience today and you’re likely to be treated to a thousand-yard stare. Or a violent denunciation of Daniel Andrews, depending on the person’s political persuasion.
The anger towards Victoria’s former premier could be a surprise to those who note that the state only four years ago gave his Labor Party a landslide election victory. But to social scientists, it isn’t so difficult to fathom.
Traumatic events – and the pandemic experience in Victoria must count as one – tend to follow a familiar pattern in their effect on the societies that weather them. In the short term, they unite. In the long term, they rend, and they deplete.
Northeastern University’s Dr Daniel Aldrich is a much-cited political scientist whose interest in disaster recovery was sparked when his community was struck by Hurricane Katrina. He has since studied many disasters, charting the resilience of affected communities in the aftermath.
Traumatic events, he tells AFR Weekend, tend to have predictable impacts on social cohesion, whether they’re a flood or a pandemic.
In the aftermath of a disaster, people feel closer to those they feel a sense of kinship with, he says. But their other bonds suffer. Their “bridging bonds” – or positive feeling towards those they only know from a shared situation – are often disrupted.
“In places like Australia and the United States, our bridging ties are already pretty thin,” Aldrich says. “Your friends are unlikely to be Afghani migrants, or recent German PhD holders, or even just people who vote differently. They’re probably people that look like you. And in COVID, people further polarised away from other types of people.”
This can be overcome with time and stability. But the biggest hit taken in crisis is usually to people’s “vertical bonds”, to government and other institutional authorities. It’s these that are often irrevocably broken.
Health policies felt strict, or draconian. Different states pursued different policies, enabling easy comparisons. “So people lose trust. Then science and expertise took a hit as well.”
Regaining trust, once broken, usually requires an extended period of the other party doing a good job with no mistakes. “And from governments, that’s pretty unlikely.”
Aldrich is not alone in arguing as much. Experts closer to home have also noted the shift.
RedBridge Group insights adviser Kristy McSweeney says the pandemic is a stalking horse of dissatisfaction, rarely raised by focus group moderators but often trotted out as a reason for not trusting authorities. Another lobbyist says he’s heard it come up at opposition fundraisers. “The government’s trying to do x, but remember they lied about y – you hear it phrased like that all the time,” he says.
University of Melbourne professor Lisa Gibbs spent a decade tracking how Victorian communities in the path of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires fared in the long term. She sees many parallels with how the state is now grappling with what happened in 2020 and 2021.
She says that in the short term, disaster breeds mobilisation. “People do come together and think ‘how do we get through this’,” Gibbs says. Think of blood donation lines that stretch around the block after a terrorist attack, or of frozen meals dropped off with grieving families, of the flowers left at the scene of tragedy. Everyone pulls together in a crisis.
“But in the longer term, we see disruptions and frustrations. There’s often uneven access to ongoing support. Soon, you can see patterns of social deterioration.
“It would be entirely reasonable to suggest that’s what we’re seeing in Victoria. It was an intense pandemic, and there was absolutely evidence of social mobilisation. People followed the requirements – often wholeheartedly. But what we’re seeing now is probably indicative of the social deterioration that follows.
“And then there are all the individual impacts: poorer mental health, a higher incidence of people struggling and elevated anger are absolutely issues in a post-disaster environment. And these compromise not only the individual and the family, but also our social connections and the efforts of people to work together.”
The fact that the pandemic fallout did not affect everyone equally can be its own source of anger and disaffection. The office worker who gave up a daily a commute didn’t lose as much as their colleague who also lost access to childcare. And neither lost as much as the CBD cafe owner who went bankrupt, or the families kept apart from loved ones in their final days.
Studies suggest those in the cities have suffered more long-term psychological distress from Victoria’s pandemic than those in the country, who were perhaps more used to a level of isolation. Teenagers often fared poorly, and some say they are even now exhibiting increased anxiety disorders. The elderly – isolated to start with – grew more so.
“It’s so complicated, and there’s insufficient research,” says the Australian Psychological Society’s Burgess. “Some people coped very well. But for many, the big thing that’s persisted is a disruption to social connectedness.”
For individuals already struggling, COVID often proved the pivot point. Dezi Freeman, long an environmentalist, became a sovereign citizen during the lockdowns, and died earlier this year in a police shootout after months on the run for the murder of two police officers. Brendan Nugent, who has been charged for allegedly driving his car into independent politician Helen Haines, reportedly also struggled since the lockdowns. For some, COVID sparked a final, tragic break.
Unlike NSW, South Australia or Queensland, Victoria retains the government that took it through its turbulent pandemic. That government’s fourth term has been scandal-plagued. The Big Build infrastructure program has become a byword for corruption. The cancelled but still-paid-for Commonwealth Games are a cruel joke. Economically, Victoria is falling behind, newly a net recipient of federal government largess, or in Saul Eslake’s words, a “mendicant state”. And state Labor realises all this, though its electoral reckoning has been a long time coming. Andrews’ hand-picked successor, Jacinta Allan, was in July deposed by her cabinet, largely for her vote-depleting failure to differentiate herself from his legacy.
The collapse in support for the government didn’t happen all at once. No institution loses credibility suddenly. “We’re incremental people, and we lose trust incrementally,” says Aldrich. “So COVID probably doesn’t tell the full story of what’s going on here.
“But COVID absolutely changed our societies. It pushed us away from each other and towards screen life, which is a more polarising environment. COVID has to be part of any story we tell.”
Having long studied disasters and their impact on social capital, Aldrich has now turned his mind to solutions. One protection against social dislocation, he argues, is social infrastructure. Public libraries, community groups or shared sporting allegiances do a world of good.
“Communities with stronger density of community facilities have stronger bridging ties,” he says. “It’s a contact hypothesis. You need lots of incidental positive contact between different types of people.”
Much of this can be government facilitated, but even so, credit rarely accrues directly to the government, in whom rebuilding trust is extremely difficult. Repairing Victoria’s finances will be the focus of whoever forms the next government. Restoring its social deficit may take it just as long.
At the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Jana Favero sees some green shoots.
The rise of One Nation and the populist right has shocked many into choosing to newly volunteer. The organisation holds regular volunteer information sessions and has recently scheduled more. For the first time since the pandemic, these are being done in person (rather than online). “Over the last 12 months or so, we’re seeing quite a sharp increase in donations and volunteering,” Favero says. “People are craving connection again.”
It’s a small thing, but also a sign that revitalisation is possible, if hard won.