Mask the Question

Dear Here to Help

Everyone should wear a face mask. Why doesn’t government just make it the law?

That is an interesting question.

Let’s take a step back. The purpose of public policy (which includes laws) is to fix problems, or gaps, in our society.

For example, without road rules, driving would become more dangerous, because the behaviour of other road-users would be less predictable. We wouldn’t know when to stop and when to go. And we wouldn’t know when others are likely to stop or go.

For many things, we don’t need laws. To take an obvious example, laws don’t tell us what to eat or when to eat it.

Sometimes, we need laws to drive behaviour, like in the road rules example.

Sometimes, public demand drives behaviour changes. For example, as investors and consumers demanded greater social and environmental responsibility from companies, most major companies now include environmental and social governance criteria in their annual reports.

And sometimes, behaviour drives public policy changes. Once upon a time, all reporting was required by law to be on paper. Today, most laws accept digital reporting. In some cases, the law requires digital reporting. Most of my interactions with the ATO are via their online tools.

So back to your question on face masks. In Melbourne, face masks are compulsory. In other parts of Australia, they are not. Government policy-makers are carefully balancing the positives and negatives of their policy responses to COVID-19, based on the advice of health experts.

In summary, the government is balancing medical advice based on individual needs of each locality. That means we are allowed to choose whether to wear masks, unless government deems the risk to be high and necessitates masks. Therefore, change will occur if people don’t act responsibly (public behaviour driving policy) or the COVID circumstances change negatively (public policy driving behaviour change).

All in all, it is up to each one of us (outside Melbourne) to choose the best course of action for ourselves, based on current government advice.

This article comes from my column entitled "Here to Help" in Hunter Local, September 2020. If you have an everyday problem just begging for a simple, real world solution, send it to "Here to Help" and let's see what we can achieve.

Elaine Abery has a closet full of great ideas and empowering solutions. She’s also the Director of Unravelling Red Tape, a company dedicated to helping everyday people, not-for-profits and companies change the world through improved decision-making and legislation.