Terry McCrann: High price for dragging out lockdown pain
It would be pointless to drag out the easing of lockdowns and prolong the pain for small and medium-sized businesses. The economic damage has already been devastating and could be cataclysmic, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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End the lockdowns NOW. There is absolutely no point in dribbling out the opening up – within states and between states – over the next one, two, three or who knows how many months.
The ‘dribble’ is now all cost in terms of the economic damage, already devastating and massively costly, and could become cataclysmic and in large part no coming back from for small and medium-sized businesses, and all with zero or near-zero benefit in terms of the virus.
Whether we open up fully or ‘dribble’, we will – obviously, but I need to stress – still need intelligent and effective social-distancing mechanisms and INCREASED and far more intelligent protection protocols for vulnerable groups.
Either way, we would still have to deal with exactly the same virus ‘spot fires’.
This is reinforced not denied by the seasonality issue.
It does remain extraordinary to me that there has been zero discussion – especially at government level and among the supposed experts – about the greater risks of the virus going into winter; and the concomitant luck we had that it erupted in our summer.
That is NOT an argument for a total lockdown until spring – the idea that could continue for the next four-to-five months would be beyond economic vandalism. It would be outright economic destructionalism.
But it does demand greater effective anti-virus protocols.
The central question to ask is this: if we had the counterfactual; if there were NO lockdowns and we had a ‘virus problem’ that was producing these near-zero daily infection rates and deaths, would anyone in their right mind be proposing ANY form of lockdown?
Partial, far less full? Closed state borders? Winter or no winter?
Of course not. That’s why, with the ‘protection protocols’ and the international travel ban, we must now deliver a full opening up.
Critical to that is opening up state borders to allow DOMESTIC tourism – and then the cross-Tasman ‘bubble’, with New Zealand our second biggest source of foreign tourists.
The financial and economic costs have already been huge: businesses destroyed or crippled; a real jobless rate of 20-25 per cent; and something like 70 per cent of the workforce getting some form of government payment.
The federal budget will plunge to a total deficit of between $250 billion and $300 billion over the next two years; ALL states will follow; and they’ll ALL struggle to get back to balance.
We cannot make all this worse; when it’s all cost and zero benefit.
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