Australians need to know when this lockdown will end
The Prime Minister and premiers have told us the coronavirus restrictions that have put businesses in “hibernation” and people into isolation will last six months. They can’t be serious. This is why Scott Morrison must tell us his exit strategy now, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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There is no way we can go on like this for six months. So today is when the Prime Minister must tell us his exit strategy.
Just when will Australians be allowed to leave their homes? When can we ask a friend over for dinner without risking jail?
When will police stop chasing people out of parks and off beaches? When can we play sport, go to church or reopen the thousands of businesses that have been shut?
Scott Morrison and the premiers talk of these restrictions lasting six months until this coronavirus crisis ends, but they can’t be serious.
How do they measure that end? When not one more person dies? What if people are still dying in September?
We don’t know. But until then, the Prime Minister says businesses can go into “hibernation” — helped by the $130 billion he’s giving to subsidise wages — and then “bounce back”.
Why do so many journalists repeat this fantasy? Businesses do not “hibernate” when they have no customers for six months. They die.
There will be no “bouncing back”. The economy will be shattered, unemployment will be massive and the government will be buried in debt.
And what of the people the government has just sentenced to six months of home detention?
In homes across Australia there are already 100,000 people who’ve just lost their jobs.
They’ve been humiliated. They are running out of money for their families and losing their savings.
They’ll be stuck in their apartments or houses, unable to leave except for essentials, and in most states banned from inviting anyone home.
The frustration, misery and isolation will make many such homes pressure cookers, despite Morrison’s bubbly advice to seize the chance to do more jigsaws with the kids, many of whom can’t go back to school.
That’s why the phone lines to some domestic violence units are already ringing off the hook. That’s why Victoria’s government has just banned gun sales.
Then there’s the loneliness.
I had an email on Wednesday from a Victorian widow who has no job and lives alone.
She writes, “I rely on my partner’s relatives and close friends for social interactions. However I am losing hope and feel I am being punished, put in a solitary confinement.
“I feel I am completely isolated, forgotten and cannot reach out to my family and friends.”
The national response to the coronavirus is itself a humanitarian disaster. We’re stopping thousands of people from getting infected by putting millions of Australians under an extreme pressure that will break many.
I backed the early bans. In fact, I said we banned flights from infected countries too late. Our airport checks on people flying in or disembarking from ships were too slack. We still don’t do enough to make sure infected people stay in their home quarantine.
True, Australia has nevertheless done extremely well to slow the spread of the virus and limit the deaths. Predictions of “150,000” dead already look hysterical.
Our toll was just 20 as of early on Wednesday. But this low figure and the pattern of those deaths suggest there may be now a way to keep people safe that doesn’t come at this horrendous social cost.
The latest dead was a 95-year-old woman. She was the fifth to die at Sydney’s Dorothy Henderson Lodge, the youngest 75.
Of the other 15 dead, eight caught the virus on a cruise ship. The youngest was 73.
The remaining seven were aged between 68 and 86. The youngest had “serious underlying health issues” and at least two were in hospital with cancer.
Yes, the young can also die from this virus, but in Italy the median age of the dead is around 80.
So doesn’t it make more sense to focus intensely on monitoring people who leave ships and planes and doing more to keep safe the elderly and frail, particularly those in old-age homes? To step up quarantine controls, but relax the home detention of everyone else?
Another way is possible, and Morrison must explain it before people crack and businesses close, thinking six months of pain will be too much.
That other way is what we see in Taiwan, which is militant in quarantining the potentially infectious and protecting the vulnerable, yet lets citizen go out, shop and even eat at restaurants.
It’s had just three deaths, and its economy still works. People aren’t going mad from loneliness and despair — as they will here, if these restrictions last six months.
Originally published as Australians need to know when this lockdown will end
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