Two pandemic rights make a repeat wrong

We cannot in 2021 contemplate going back to lockdowns, state border closures or the JobKeeper safety net.

An ACT Police check point on the Federal Highway, coming into Canberra from NSW in January. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

We cannot go back to lockdowns. We cannot go back to state border closures. And we cannot – and won’t - go back to a JobKeeper 2.0.

It is – of should be – undeniably clear that we got two big things right in 2020. That is to say, the federal government got them right.

The first and easily the most important was closing the international border – like NZ, putting our relatively unique island advantage to spectacular use – starting with of course banning flights from China.

The only possible – and unreasonable and so unfair – criticism would be that we could have done it sooner, especially the flights from outside China.

What’s got pretty much completely missed in all this, is just how lucky we were – in relation to the virus – thanks to those Christmas-New Year bushfires.

As a friend of mine and occasional correspondent with our fellow paper the Australian, keeps pointing out: this dissuaded up to something like 100,000 Chinese tourists coming here in those crucial pre-closure months of January and February.

The second thing was JobKeeper – at least at the overall macro level for the economy. It’s why we had one of the strongest bounce-backs in the world after the near globally universal June quarter economic plunges.

The one country that did not plunge in the June quarter was China!

It had its lockdowns, and plunge, in the March quarter. After giving the world the virus and sending everyone plunging, in the June quarter China was almost uniquely already on the recovery path!

Even more extraordinarily, it now ranks 92nd on the Worldometer table for Covid infections – that’s, to stress, the world’s biggest population country, not in per capita but in absolute number terms.

JobKeeper helped many companies survive through the Covid19 pandemic.

What is also now – or should be - apparent about JobKeeper, is that it has been widely ‘rorted’; and not by the big end of town but by SMEs.

The Ownership Matters analysis showed that the 300 biggest companies got $2.45bn of the initial $90bn – most of JobKeeper - and $700mn or so of that went to a single company, Qantas, which had its entire business shut down for three months

The other $87bn-plus went to SMEs.

Now you might say then, it wasn’t actually a rort – hence my quotation marks - for in the famous words of John Singleton, a “rort’s only a rort when you’re not in on it”, and it appears everyone was in on this one.

That said, the (over) generosity did pay a big dividend in sustaining consumer spending and boosting the recovery.

The proof of both – the over-generosity and the economy- sustaining – is arguably in the way we seem to have come out of JobKeeper with little evidence of any big jobless spike.

But it can not be repeated. Even if a better-targeted JobKeeper 2.0 could be designed, we cannot go back to another round of huge spending and a further mammoth rise in government debt.

According to the IMF we’ve had the biggest per capita surge in debt among the major countries – I’d hold my beer until we see where Joe Biden’s America is going – with federal debt headed for $1tr and it’s not going to stop there.

Arguably, after the international border closure, the lockdowns and the state border closures were not only unnecessary but devastatingly bad policy – with NSW showing how the virus could be tracked and closed down without them.

There were only two major breakouts; and both were caused by a breakdown at the international border, with the virus being brought into the country.

NSW’s Ruby Princess debacle and Victoria’s Hotel non-Quarantine 1.0.

But whatever the arguments over 2020, we cannot in 2021 contemplate going back to lockdown or state border closure repeats.

Arguably the states only got away with it in 2020 thanks to the JobKeeper safety net. In 2021, they won’t have it; they must not have it.

Originally published as Two pandemic rights make a repeat wrong