We must tread with care
This may not be the best time to invoke Chinese proverbs, but here’s one anyway: He who rides the tiger is afraid to dismount. It’s a caution against courses of action that are not only hard to sustain, but hard to abandon safely.
New Zealand reluctantly climbed on to the back of the Covid-19 tiger and, although we have ridden it almost into the ground, it is only diminished. It still lives and remains capable of swift and savage revival.
Eager as we may be to clamber off the brute, we must tread with care. Level three presents fresh risk, not less risk.
Our social lives are still hugely constrained and must remain so for at least two weeks – which means the disciplines of social distancing, hygiene and comparative stay-puttedness cannot be relaxed.
These have become tediously familiar exhortations but if a sufficient minority fails to heed them – or even by a failure of imagination people of good intent don’t manage to detect and avoid the pitfalls surrounding new situations – then we languish longer in our confinements and worsen the economic and social environment that lies ahead for us.
Still, we’ve earned this much. The first day of level three on Tuesday brought limited liberations. A day, even, when people commented inwonder about reopened landfill sites and sent exultant social media messages about how exciting it was to be out in the world again.
And as more businesses stirred it was also a day of tolerable indulgences, when takeaways were received as if holy communion. After the imposed virtue of home cooking, amass pilgrimage to our fast-food temples and callouts for doorstep deliveries can be seen more as reward than relapse.
Here, too, was a chance to improve the new normal by favouring local businesses that have themselves geared up for new ways to serve us from safe, respectful distances. It is time, almost literally, for them to cash in on some of the goodwill they have long built up when the personal touch wasn’t quite so out-of-reach as it currently remains.
This is not a bad example of the sorts of choices that lie ahead. Our consumer choices may well be more limited for a long time to come, given the reduced incomes that face so many of us, but our willingness to be strategic about how and where we spend will be crucial to the fates of so many businesses owners and employees.
The landscape into which we will gradually emerge has already suffered almighty economic impacts and more lie ahead, starting with the potential for awave of unemployment when the wage subsidy comes off.
Key though the roles of government and business will be in sustaining and reinvigorating our economy, the householder also has choices of real significance, including those with reduced incomes.
They will look around and seewho has behaved honourably and well, and who has not. At local and national level, some brandswill be enhanced and some will stand exposed.
The householder also has choices of real significance ... They will look around and see who has behaved honourably and well, and who has not.