Coronavirus: First the test, then the change NZ needs
Our month of lockdown will be the worst of times, it will be the best of times, it will be a time of wisdom, it will be a time of foolishness, it will be a time of belief, it will be a time of incredulity, it will be a season of light, it will be a season of darkness, for some it will be a spring of hope, for others it will be a winter of despair.
(With profound apologies to Charles Dickens . . . ) It will be a tale of dozens of cities and towns and five million people each being united in acting alone against a dangerous, unseen foe the like of which we haven’t seen in a hundred years.
The Government is asking all of us to do something we and they have never tried before.
Keeping the country operating while keeping everyone at home for a month seem mutually exclusive.
It is a brave foray into unchartered territory, and it will be unreasonable to expect it to be one hundred per cent successful.
It won’t be and it can’t be.
It was therefore heartening to see the initial carping criticism of the Government by Opposition MPs being toned down to unreserved support and constructive criticism.
That is what we rightfully expect of them in times of crisis.
If China had such a system we might not be facing this global pandemic as an effective opposition would have required action much earlier, but there were weeks of denial before there was even an admission of the outbreak.
By that time the genie was out of the bottle and already far beyond Chinese borders.
In New Zealand the inconvenience and loss, both personal and financial, will not be shared evenly.
No defence system could do that.
For some, staying at home for a month will be no novelty or hardship, particularly in remote rural areas where ‘‘going to town’’ has been a fortnightly or monthly expedition to buy groceries and other essentials, for generations.
For others it will be like unearned home detention with subsequent strain on marriages and relationships.
They will be at the easy end of the scale as other families will likely face fatalities unless we are very lucky, and luck will play a huge part in our lives over the next month or more.
Much of the burden of the lockdown will be carried by those with significant investments in business operations.
Hundreds will be required to close down for a month.
Many will never reopen regardless of the massive financial rescue package. For them, and indeed the rest of us, there will be no return to what we know today as business as usual.
Some complain, with justification, that they are being forced to make huge financial sacrifices on behalf of the nation, others look for ways around the restrictions, but many are willingly risking their lives.
Police, medical professionals, emergency volunteers, essential shop and petrol station staff, public transport drivers and many others will be out in the danger zone keeping the heart of the country beating while the rest of us go into hiding.
There will also be hundreds of professional journalists taking similar risks to keep us informed hour by hour.
We owe them all.
On the other side of the national emergency there must be a new norm as over population and poor infrastructure in parts of the world will guarantee that this will likely happen again soon.
We must be ready for that.
This must be a turning point in our history. The new road ahead will be unlike anything we have known so far if we have the wisdom to learn from it and are brave enough to grasp the opportunities which all adversities bring.
We will need to rethink the unmitigated consumerism we have allowed to develop unchecked in the past century and rebuild a much simpler, less exploitative, economy. We simply don’t need much of the trivia we buy.
We must become less reliant on supermarkets to provide the things we could provide for ourselves.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of highly productive soil, in quarter acre urban house sections, grow lawns and decorative shrubbery instead of spuds and green vegetables.
Also many of our young people have little idea about basic cooking at home.
Fast food and junk food is the norm for too many of them and that will need to change.
The stand-out need for change however is that we can never again allow our economy to become so heavily dependent on unreliable international tourism.
That industry will take the biggest hit of all and it would be unforgivably foolish to rebuild it to current proportions.
It has a place in our future but only on a much reduced and tightly regulated scale.