Day 19 Thursday 9th April

A relatively slow news day today, but with persistent ruminations about the road out of this mess. What to do next with this wishful thinking? Rugby League putting dates on a resumption. Press articles taking stock of costs and opportunities. The language of breaking and reframing cannot be far away. Spain has signaled its intention to adopt a Universal Basic Income. Is the right in retreat or grasping at straws to defend business as usual that can never be usual again? The virus should represent at least a semi-colon, a breath pause, in the continuity of our faulty economic model embedded in western civilization.

Maybe the job-keeper funding injection will shore up dignity and personal viability. Justice Higgins, mentioned yesterday in relation to the 1907 origins of the basic wage, regarded the standard sought as “the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilized community” and in “a condition of frugal comfort estimated by current human standards.”

Perhaps we should move to the metaphor of lego reconstruction? It lies in rubble around us. Some pieces left behind, new ones coupled in novel ways, an edifice to meet human needs, not thrown into the maw of the machine. Can we now see the invisible people and care about their life chances? Let’s have less ownership and more stewardship. As ethicist Matthew Beard said recently:

“This is the pivot that our moral imagination requires of us. We shouldn’t see the social distancing, isolation, quarantine, travel bans and the host of other impositions on our behavior as frustrations or burdens to be resented and worked around where possible. We should see it as an opportunity to rescue people. To save their lives.”

Are we beginning to see beyond disruption and confinement to imagine a new social and economic order for Australia?

The numbers today have advanced by 90 for Australia to a total of 6,103. For NSW there have been 39 additional cases for a total of 2,773. Deaths for Australia are now 51, with 21 from NSW. The global incidence of infection is over 1.5 million (one week after it reached 1 million) and there have been over 88,000 deaths (14,800 from the US).