Opinion
Six months in, we owe it to ourselves to face some challenging truths
The future is just about here and it’s not all that wonderful. It can be hard to recall now, given the woozy, wild ride we’ve been on since autumn, but back in March when the first serious wave of restrictions on our lives were imposed, there was still a sense of optimism around.
Unless and until a safe, effective and long-lasting vaccine is developed, manufactured, distributed and given to a very large proportion of the population, our society and economy are going to remain restricted and diminished.Credit:Bloomberg
Many of us budgeted mentally and financially for a difficult six months once the global COVID-19 pandemic was declared. After that, it was thought that the worst might be over. The federal government built that time frame into its key support measures, notably JobKeeper and JobSeeker. Some over-enthusiastic reports suggested that a vaccine could be developed by September.
Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for his prediction from around that time that one day the novel coronavirus would just disappear. But deep down, didn’t a lot of us want to believe that he might be right? There’s always been the hope that sooner rather than later the wave of a magic wand by some unseen hand would deliver us from this awful reality – our separation from the sufferers, the fear that the virus was everywhere and everyone else was a carrier, the economic damage.
But here we are at the six-month mark, almost into the final quarter of the year, and the expectation that we could start to meaningfully put the pandemic behind us has been exposed as an understandable bout of wishful thinking.
True, there have been some encouraging developments. The national recession apparently has not been as deep as expected. Signs of recovery outside of Victoria are emerging. The August jobless figures showed a fall in unemployment of almost one percentage point.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Most of the restored jobs look to be gig economy jobs. A true recovery can’t be built on that. In any event, the support measures have had to be extended. If their eventual withdrawal doesn’t go the way we want it to and Victoria’s troubles continue to hurt nationally, the recovery could head into reverse.
And then there’s the hard reality that the nation is still trying to get its head around: we’re going to be living with COVID-19 for a while yet.
Having put the six-month illusion behind us, we owe it to ourselves to face some challenging truths. Unless and until a safe, effective and long-lasting vaccine is developed, manufactured, distributed and given to a very large proportion of the population, our society and economy are going to remain restricted and diminished.
Physically, we remain shut off from the rest of the world and there seems little prospect of that changing any time soon, as it is one of our main defences against the virus. On Friday, Scott Morrison said he hoped that every Australian overseas who wants to return can be back here by Christmas.
That alone tells us how far away we are from getting back to normal, however we define “normal”: it’ll be a big deal if Australians can be in Australia.
Unless Victoria messes up again, it can be expected to rejoin the rest of Australia some time in November, with negligible and manageable levels of infection. But that will merely signify that every part of the country is on the same page as it navigates its way through the next stage of the pandemic.
Victoria’s second wave of infections, which has prompted such drastic and extended limitations on the liberties and activities of Victorians, has stimulated a debate about how we should expect to live and work and study while the virus continues to look for new hosts within the community.
Partly because the Andrews government’s measures have been so harsh and wide-ranging, they’ve led to some extreme criticisms from inside and outside the state.
Variously, the responses have been that Daniel Andrews over-reacted to the second wave, that the virus itself is not as deadly or as harmful as it’s been made out to be, that all you need to do is separate elderly Australians from everyone else in order to protect them, that human rights should not be overtaken by health concerns, that economic harm can be just as physically and psychologically damaging as COVID-19 and that even with outbreaks, many businesses could operate safely with physical distancing and masks.
If every business operator and CEO who’s been arguing in the media for their particular field of operation to be opened up, with very few or no restrictions, got their way, there’d be very little difference from the pre-pandemic economy.
But is that what most Australians want? At times, it seems that there’s a furious debate going on in the media about freedoms and government measures while at the community level there’s a more settled attitude to the reality of living in a COVID-19 world and the many day-to-day concessions that have had to be made. Not everyone is part of that settlement, of course, but in most cases biology will trump all else. That’s how we’re made.
One thing you hear often is how much people want 2020 to be over. We'll get a short psychological boost when the calendar flips over from 2020 to 2021 for sure but the pandemic will still be with us.
Let’s look forward to the day when the state borders are open, when across the country, most businesses and schools and sporting events will be operating. But we’ll still be necessarily wary of each other, fearful of an outbreak. It can only be a lesser version of what we’ve had.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist.