We ‘did’ 2020 pretty damn good

Could we have done better? On the quarantine alone, obviously, but let’s look at the positives.

A nurse takes a nasal sample of a nursing aide for a rapid Covid-19 test before she can start her shift at a nursing home for elderly in Lerum, Sweden on December 18, 2020. Picture: Adam Ihse / TT News Agency / AFP

In all the fear and loathing of - and scrambling in the dark through – this year of plague, we’ve actually done a pretty good, indeed remarkably good, job.

This is not to say that mistakes weren’t made – the biggest of which was of course Victoria’s quarantine disaster, responsible all on its own for nearly 90 per cent of all the virus deaths.

But take that one – yes humungous - mistake out, and we would have had close to world’s best outcome on the virus itself; and, and this is my key point, without having completely shuttered and shattered the economy, destroying businesses, jobs and indeed lives.

Could we have done better? Heck, yes: just on the quarantine alone, obviously.

But, heck also, considering that no-one had ever “been here before” – trying to respond to a global pandemic which literally flew into the country – you have to reasonably conclude that we, as in policymakers, did a pretty good job, in all the circumstances and uncertainties and unknowables.

This is said, NOT excluding all those arguably over-the-top state border closures, which arguably were unnecessarily economically destructive, set against the real risk of virus transmission.

I suggest it is not simply unfair but pointless to assess our outcomes against perfection – and especially, against “20-20 rear view perfection”.

Heck, even knowing back in February what we now know in December, I challenge anyone to mount a convincing argument we could have done it spectacularly better.

And it’s all too-easy now to forget just how legitimately intense and pervasive was the fear and loathing – and most critically, the genuine UNKNOWING – back at the start.

We got it right – to repeat again, not perfect, but right, in outcomes and in balancing the economic and medical costs – because of three things.

The first and most important was closing the international borders.

It’s not been well appreciated that Victoria’s quarantine disaster was in fact a living demonstration of how much worse it would have been if we hadn’t.

We ‘would have been Europe’ if we hadn’t; they literally couldn’t really close them, and so the virus has bounced from country to country and within countries all year and now savagely into their winter.

The second and third were the national lockdown and the offsetting fiscal and monetary stimulus – the massive spending, especially on JobKeeper (and JobSeeker), the interest rate cuts to zero and the critical, less publicly obvious, things the Reserve Bank did with the banks.

The net was we had one of the smallest plunges in our economy in the June quarter. We went down 7 per cent. Only South Korea, down 3.2 per cent, did better among major countries. The UK plunged 20 per cent. The US was down 9 per cent.

Oh yes, and China. It alone had plunged in the March quarter – it got the virus early, it locked down, savagely, early as it was also exporting both virus and the lockdowns, so to speak, to everyone else – and so its economy leapt in the June quarter when everyone else was plunging.

In the September quarter our economy made back only a little less than half the June quarter plunge. The ‘only’ was thanks to Victoria: it would have been more like 70-80 per cent if Victoria had opened up.

As I’ve noted though, this meant Victoria operated like a super-charger in the December quarter.

I’ve previously said we would go close to making up all the ground lost; the retail spending splurge makes it clear we will finish the year ahead of where we were a year ago.

That’s going to look pretty good against just about everybody else – and we didn’t have to “do a Sweden” to do it.

Originally published as We ‘did’ 2020 pretty damn good