Stay cautious

THE AFL and the NRL have the green light, but local footy is still a few weeks away. The schools aren’t back, but they are going back. They will be staggered and some students will still be at home. This weekend you can hit up some outdoor group training classes as long as there are fewer than a soccer team, tennis courts are open and the golf courses are teeing off again.

The key is to maintain social distancing.

This will not be a problem for most of my golfing buddies. Social distancing has been a feature of our games for years. We see each other at the start of each hole and then spend the rest of the day on our own searching for a little white ball in a sea of endless green.

The problem with these reinstated activities is not so much the activities themselves, as the associated activities around the activities.

Banging a driver is not the problem, but hanging around the Nineteenth Hole is a concern. So the bars and restaurants are playing off a handicap and the big irony is that some businesses have never closed.

Take a wander past any residential building site.

A few in my neighbourhood have been powering along. Not too many tradies have been claiming JobKeeper. Real estate agents may have been prevented from holding open houses but the folk on the tools haven’t paused to take a breath, let’s just hope they’re maintaining 1.5m distance at smoko.

The same can be said for Australia Post and the supermarkets, food deliveries, Bunnings, JB and the other big box retailers. If you’d been out in Waurn Ponds on the weekend, you would have had to stop and check your calendar. The carparks were chock-ablock. It looked more like a “last-minute Christmas” crowd than 2020 Mother’s Day in social isolation.

So it came as a surprise to see a mass of protesters converging on the steps of State Parliament. They came in their multiple dozens (maybe a few hundred) declaring that they wanted Bill Gates arrested and . . . who knows what else? There was a fair crop of lunatic fringe going on with that demonstration.

The State Government has handled this pandemic with aplomb.

There are so many moving parts, and there’s nothing wrong with being cautious when it comes to public health.

Case in point is America.

The US is looking precariously divided.

This is the country that has always championed the rights of the individual above all else. Exceptionalism trumps community and in the last half of the 20th

century, socialism and communism were built up to be the greatest threat to the American way of life.

Now, thanks to a non-existent public health sector, a severely limited social safety net and a hardwired suspicion of the intentions of their “Deep State” forces in the federal government, America is facing a rocky road to recovery.

The debt can be managed, but their social divisions may never heal. At least Australia has not blindly adopted the partisan political hectoring that the US is perpetrating on itself.

This year it will conduct presidential elections. It will be interesting to see if there will be mass gatherings and rallies or if health restrictions will change the way campaigns are conducted.

Without mass assemblies, Donald Trump is going to struggle. His base is the mob.

“Lock Her Up” was a compelling battle cry. But his conspiracy theory hype sounds sad and lonely in the socially distanced press conferences that he is forced to deliver in the time of corona.

The one true thing that we have learned from 2020?

It is impossible to predict the future. You can prepare for the worst, but you can never know when the worst will decide to arrive.

Our federal budget is no longer “back in black”; we are back to the drawing board. We are getting back to normal, but nothing has changed.

We can still expect outbreaks and an increase in cases of corona. We must keep working from home if we can, washing our hands like surgeons and keep maintaining our social distance.

We must make sure the first giant leap into new normal is one step forward . . . not two steps back.