Many in the media are calling this pandemic the great disturbance. This talent for understatement is akin to an associate in South Carolina referring to the American Civil War as the great unpleasantness. With case numbers declining and deaths stable in Australia, calls for a “snap back” are becoming more insistent. Not, however, with the same unanimity of the lemmings over the cliff in the USA who are swapping public health discipline for perceived civil liberty entitlements.
The Grattan Institute has crunched the numbers and projected an unemployment shock of 14%-26% or 3.5 million of the workforce. Sectors such as retail, hospitality and particularly the arts are likely to be hit first. Concerns are rapidly moving from the human to the economic, especially how to pay back $320 billion. We need to find a way to make the dismal science less dismal. Some industry links need to de-couple from their co-dependence. Job losses from BHP in earlier years in Wollongong were more keenly felt because of the knock-on impact on supply enterprises. Virgin is one of those “sticky” enterprises that associated industries adhere to in a tenuous symbiosis. It will unravel this week without significant external support, including possible part-nationalization, a sign of market failure.
Coroners are already at work diagnosing national responses to contingencies like COVID-19 for application when the next unknown threat strikes. Many have been slow to utilize technology effectively. New alliances after snap-back need to be based on something other than defense capability. We need to neutralize ethnocentrism and triumphalism (which might now be called trumphalism).
A mandatory code is being drafted to bring the tech titans to heel to pay for stolen content from news organizations, using the product of journalists on their digital platforms. The issue is being viewed legally as a competition rather than a copyright matter. These culprits are the same global giants we have been unable to extract tax due from. In other current news former PM Malcolm Turnbull has published his revelatory memoir “A Bigger Picture”, controversial both for the release by a PM office staffer of pirated digital copies and for what he says about former colleagues and the bully that is POTUS.
Adelaide welcomed a plane load (374) of returning Aussies who will now go into mandatory fourteen-day isolation in hotels. In a tiny glimpse of a snap-back, Coogee, Maroubra and Clovelly beaches were reopened but not for sunbaking or social gathering, just for exercise at a distance from others.
In justifying the general exultation, Australia reported only fourteen cases today (total 6,620 and still 71 deaths). NSW accounted for just six new cases (total 2,963 and 30 deaths). The global count is 2,407,380 and 165,000 deaths (though the reports of some nations are regarded as rubbery).
Awesomely Astute 