COVID, crisis, and unordinary order: A critical analysis of Australia’s JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme as an exceptional measure

Carl Schmitt’s famous articulation of the relation between sovereignty and the exception emphasises not simply the basis for a suspension of the law in a state of emergency, but the role of the sovereign in deciding upon the existence of the ‘normal situation’, the ‘everyday frame of life’ which the law requires to function. Our pandemic times have included extreme biopolitical measures deployed to manage the health crisis, but also unprecedented political responses to regularise or stabilise the economic order. One example is Australia’s historic JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme. As law, it was given life by an executive power predicated on nationhood and enlivened by crisis. As policy, it was intended to help businesses retain workers through targeted, proportionate support. In reality, it also provided significant protections and even windfalls to corporations and their investors, leading to critiques of the scheme as corporate welfare. However, rather than highlighting deficiencies of the JobKeeper programme, these outcomes underscore its ultimate function. This article analyses the relationship between norm, exception, and order in the context of Australia’s flagship economic-policy response to the pandemic. First, by analysing the mutually constitutive relationship between norm and exception, employing the theories of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. Second, by critically examining the legislative basis for JobKeeper, its political narrative and practical outcomes. Third, by demonstrating that the scheme, though an extraordinary departure from policy, can be understood as fundamentally a different and exceptional method to secure and reproduce our neoliberal corporate order in a state of exception. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41020-022-00166-9.