James Campbell: Why our city and state could be forever changed
Life is finally getting back to normal in Melbourne but how historians review the Lockdown of 2020 will depend on how quickly the economy recovers. And until the virus threat has truly passed, we risk losing the pleasures we have just begun to taste again, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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Spring is in the air. The streets are suddenly full of people. Shops are open. You can sit at a table outside with a coffee. Restaurants are serving. People are smiling as they pass each other in the street.
Well, I think they are. It’s a bit hard to tell as we’re all wearing masks.
Welcome to Melbourne’s Third Step.
It will take a bit of getting used to for those who have got used to them, but from today we will just have to live without the Premier’s daily press conferences.
Yes, life’s really getting back to normal here in Melbourne town.
True, we can’t have who we like over to our place and those of us who can must still work from home.
But when you think about where we were a month ago, it is hard not to feel chipper.
And things are going to get even better soon.
When Dan’s “COVID-normal” kicks we’ll be allowed unfettered visitors, though we are apparently to be encouraged to keep a visitor’s book which will allow our guests to leave suggestions.
I made the last bit up but you get the drift.
Things are slowly returning to something resembling life as it was before March.
If we get a vaccine that works well enough (opinions differ on how likely this is to happen and quickly), we will be able to get rid of our masks and unrestricted foreign travel will be back.
If all that comes to pass in the next year, the Great Pandemic and Lockdown of 2020 could end up being treated by historians of the 21st Century the same way Spanish flu has been treated by the historians of the 20th — as something mentioned only passing, an event that seemed important at the time but which with hindsight didn’t really change things.
The answer to that will depend of course how quickly the economy recovers.
If by this time next year everything is going gangbusters again, with the foreign students all back and the billions Dan plans to borrow washing its way through to people’s pockets, I suspect memories will quickly fade of the year we all locked down.
If that were to happen the political consequences of the lockdown could well be negligible.
By the time the next state election rolls around in two years’ time the whole thing might seem like a bad dream.
Those of us who have thought about it assumed that poll will still be dominated by the politics of the pandemic with Daniel Andrews — if he is still there — seen as the man who beat the virus or the fool who wrecked Victoria by allowing to escape from the quarantine hotels.
But what if the whole thing is so far in the rear-view mirror by November 2022 that the election turns on the usual things state elections usually turn, jobs, schools and hospitals?
If that were to happen who is to say Labor wouldn’t be returned with the same sort of majority it got two years ago?
I’m not saying it will play out like that.
The chances are the economy will not snap back — to use a phrase we don’t seem to hear so much as we did a few months ago.
The chances are we are in for a very nasty time here in Victoria for the next couple of years.
That is so even if the virus doesn’t make a comeback.
If it does return and we have to go back to anything like the regime we have just begun to escape, we could be in for the worst slump since the 1930s.
If fate were to single us out again for a visitation while the rest of Australia rolls on as it has the past three months, the effect on our collective psychology, well, it doesn’t really bear thinking about.
And until we can be sure that danger has passed, I suspect we won’t dare to take for granted the pleasures we have just begun to taste again.
How could we? We know how little it would take for the daily press conferences to resume.
And if there’s one thing this year has taught us it is that a big slice of Melbourne’s population who have seemed to relish the restrictions placed on the pleasures of other people.
For people of my generation it had seemed the wowser Melbourne of last century, the Melbourne of the six o’clock swill, the Melbourne where everything was closed on Sunday, had died.
This pandemic has shown it was merely sleeping, waiting to come roaring back to life just as the virus roared out of Dan’s quarantine hotels.
I keep saying it, but I am convinced there will be plenty of people for whom the stress of worrying about whether Dan will lock us in our houses again will be too much — they’ll take off as soon as they are able.
It won’t be the first time Victoria has lost population interstate — indeed it has been a feature of every economic downturn in Victoria since the 1890s.
But it will be the first time they’ve fled a state’s government rather than its economy.
I hope I’m wrong and in the meantime we should enjoy ourselves while we can.
Who knows how long it will last.
James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist