Terry McCrann: The idea we can choose between lives and the economy is false
The idea that the coronavirus crisis is a choice between saving lives and saving the economy is false. Tough decisions can no longer be put off, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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Can 2020 get any weirder? Don’t hold my beer; we’ve still got another 11 weeks of it to go.
After the shock early morning resignation of the head of his department, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s first virus-presser after bringing up his ton on Friday was always going to be ‘interesting’.
Who would have guessed, who could possibly have guessed, that his counterpart in NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, would well and truly upstage him by giving evidence that was truly interesting, in the old-fashioned way, without the quotation marks, to a corruption inquiry involving — who else these days? — politicians.
On Friday it looked like Andrews was the odds-on favourite to be the first premier to fall under the (self-driven) bus — outside, that is, an election where voters made that decision. On Monday it looked like he would now be the second.
In the wake of all this and in particular Josh Frydenberg’s extraordinary budget — and even more importantly, ahead of whatever might come at us in the new year, assuming we manage to get through the last of this one — it is important to make a fundamental correction. Politicians — and Frydenberg was at it continually last week – keep blaming the virus for causing the recession, for destroying businesses, jobs and lives.
Now, clever and scheming as this virus is — and the politicians and especially Andrews keep stressing this — the virus hasn’t actually sacked a single worker, the virus hasn’t actually closed a single business. It is what politicians have ordered to supposedly fight the virus which has done all that. The fact that they have all done it in nearly every country does not change that basic truth.
Now we can argue about whether the decisions were sensibly or timely made; but they were made, by human beings not by a virus.
Those decisions will continue to have to be made by human beings — and not just in the immediate future in terms of Victoria and its world’s-most-savage lockdown but also all the other states with their varying degrees of restrictions. These decisions will continue to have to be made all the way through 2021 and beyond.
Unlike a treasurer and a treasury preparing fantasy budget projections, we cannot just “assume a vaccine” — the ultimate ‘economist’s assumed can-opener’. Nor can we make fatuous observations that if we have to choose between money and lives — between allowing an economy to function and a lockdown — we have to go for the lives/lockdown.
No, it should now be brutally apparent that it is also a very real choice between groups of lives: people are dying because of the lockdowns. And those ‘other’ lives lost are going to become both increasingly apparent and seriously increasing in number, the longer we prevent the economy — and a normal society — from functioning.
Even if the vaccine was to arrive in ‘late 2021’ — a huge if — it will be too late; we have to face real decisions now.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: The idea we can choose between lives and the economy is false