It didn’t take long for the worst leadership class in the world to trash their good fortune.
The first virus lockdown was easy. We had summer. It was telegraphed from overseas. We had no community transmission to speak of. We just did what everyone else did.
Voila! Geniuses.
No longer. As our second wave gets moving, we have an increasingly fragmented and cross-purposed regime of overlapping poor policy that reminds one of the heady days of different railway gauges between states. Witness:
- Victoria is surging towards Stage 4 draconian lockdown to eradicate its outbreak.
- NSW shut the border too late and is now chasing its tail into a local epidemic.
- But it has refused to lockdown. So, not only will its virus spread before it is forced to shut, making the ultimate lockdown longer, it is now making VIC’s increasingly severe lockdown entirely pointless.
- QLD has opened up directly into the southern storm and is going to be beautiful one day and very sick the next, doubling the pain of local businesses in due course and also stuffing up VIC.
- SA is doing better, enjoying its backwater status. WA should clearly secede to become the richest and virus-free Chinese province in the world.
Over the top of this mess is a hapless PM demanding economic reopening to boost business for his precious budget. From the AFR:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ruled out pursuing a strategy to try and eliminate the coronavirus in Australia, saying it would cause the unemployment rate to double and ruin the economy.
And it wouldn’t stop outbreaks like the one in Victoria because that was caused by a quarantine breach, not the suppression strategy being pursued.
His stance, which was backed by business, came as medical experts began suggesting a move from a strategy of controlled suppression to eradication in response to the second wave of infections in Victoria and beyond.
OK then. That should mean the absolute death of ALL non-Australian inflows of people. No students. No tourists. No businesspeople. NOBODY. Or does ScoMo want to keep the virus bubbling away so that he can import infected migrants at no political risk? For property prices perhaps?
Let’s give NSW the benefit of the doubt for a few days and see if it can pull it off. I very much doubt it. Australia is not North Asia where suppression strategies work best owing to:
- monocultural values;
- patriarchal obedience to severe tracking regimes;
- harsh policing and universal mask-wearing.
Without these, suppression looks more like convulsive shutdown leading to fatigue and, eventually, to US-style indifference and death.
