There’s no easy way out of this
BACK in early January, I pondered in this space whether history might be about to speed up again after a 10-year period in which nothing much had seemed to change.
That, of course, turned out to be the understatement of the decade.
Each day is bringing changes that were, until they happened, literally unimaginable. Three weeks ago the Prime Minister was planning on going to the football. Today we’re being advised not to leave the house.
The current regime might feel oppressive but we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Make no mistake: our train is travelling on the same track as continental Europe; the only question is how many stations we stop at before we reach the final destination of a complete lockdown with the country closed except essential services, with the population of our cities confined to their houses on pain of punishment.
The quicker we reach that destination, the quicker we will get the crisis under control, the quicker we can start to unlock things and things can get back to normal. We can’t know how long that will take. Or even if we will have to do it all again if the virus returns.
What we can be certain of is that we are already paying the price for not going hard enough earlier. Our governments — state and federal — are guilty of what British journalist Stephen Bush calls “bothism” — the tendency across all organisations when faced with two sets of incompatible choices to try to do both, with predictable consequences.
In this case the predictable consequence is upon us. We have neither prevented a pandemic nor preserved the economy. Eventually the pandemic will pass of course. The economic consequences will be with us for years.
The world is going to be a very different place when we come out of the other side of this. Businesses are going to close, never to re-open. Some will be household names. More and more trade is going to migrate to the internet, putting more pressure on the already struggling bricks and mortar retailers.
The rental market for inner-city apartments will struggle too, I suspect. At the moment it is sustained by thousands of foreign students. Will they be coming back any time soon? Not for a while would be my guess because I suspect the stop on international travel will stay in place long after the internal lockdown has been lifted to prevent the virus being reimported.
Which means that even when the borders are reopened, until a vaccine is developed anyone entering the country is going to be subjected to the sort of quarantine procedures that will deter most of us. That will mean curtains for the Bali mini-break too unless you’ve 14 days leave up your sleeve to spend at home when you get back.
The biggest change from this disaster will not be any particular practical effect however but a general change in our attitude to the state.
Coercion that would have been unimaginable a month ago is already here, with more on the way. Moreover, having stopped the economy and destroyed wealth on a scale almost too terrible to contemplate, the state will have an indispensable role in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Many of the businesses that survive are going to spend years on some form of government life-support. How will people react to that? Will they rebel? Will they accept it grimly as the price of the return of some sort of normality, or will they actually embrace it?
My suspicion is that free-marketeers of the Institute of Public Affairs variety are in for a nasty shock and we are looking at a return to the 1970s, if not the 1940s.
That these changes are being wrought by apparently conservative governments both here and in the UK is an irony worth savouring and ties in with my belief that what the Australian public really wants in a government is Labor measures without the Labor Party.
As great as they are, however, these changes are not the most important alteration that this crisis is going to bring about in our societies.
What really worries me about this crisis is that it is starkly demonstrating that one of the arguments for why we could never have a proper war again — that we wouldn’t accept the coercion required — has been shown to be nothing more than wishful thinking.
We are removing a handrail and we don’t even seem to be noticing it.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO BE A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE WHEN WE COME OUT OF THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS. BUSINESSES ARE GOING TO CLOSE, NEVER TO RE-OPEN.