Coronavirus: More than ever we’re seeking signposts to safety

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

History has mixed lessons for leaders who steer their countries through wars or times of great national­ trauma. They are not alway­s rewarded in the recovery phase.

In 1945, war-weary Britons turfed out Winston Churchill, ­voting Labor’s Clement Attlee into office in a landslide, partly out of fear the country would return to Depression-era conditions.

Immediately after the first Gulf War, when Kuwait was liberated from Saddam Hussein’s grip, George­ HW Bush enjoyed hero status — 90 per cent of Americans approved of his presidency. Little more than a year later, in 1992, he was defeated by Bill Clinton, who made “it’s the economy, stupid” his rallying call.

During our previous recession, shortly before the March 1993 election, unemployment figures were published showing a million Australians were out of work. The Herald Sun, then the country’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, ran the figure in bold type across the top of the front page. The number looked like a killer blow for Paul Keating.

Yet Keating won, helped by opposition­ leader John Hewson, who had saddled himself with economic policies he could neither sell nor explain. Australians stuck with the devil they knew.

Labor believed Keating won because people trusted him to look after them — even though as treasurer he was the architect of their dire predicament. They feared Hewson would stop their unemployment benefits. John Howard defeated Keating at the next election after defining ­Keating’s term with the devastating line that he had delivered five minutes of economic sunshine.

Scott Morrison has not in any way engineered this crisis and has done his best to handle it, but there will still be questions about whether that has been good enough, whether his judgment calls under incredibly stressful conditions have been the right ones.

One of the problems during wars, or times of great stress, is that some politicians think the normal rules don’t apply, that they have a licence to lie or hide the truth. There are also too many people willing to excuse them for it, when what we really need at all times is reliable information and lots of it, as survival depends on it.

So some advice for politicians: don’t turn up for press conferences armed with spin or misinform­ation. Don’t complain about “gotcha” interviews if you are not across the facts, and you think you can make it up as you go, or wing it with platitudes. Be clear with your instructions about what people can or can’t do.

Best not to declare a national emergency response one day then saturate the media the next to re­assur­e people they can carry on as normal, as the Prime Minister did only a month ago when there were fewer than 20 cases of corona­virus. Half his listeners ransacked supermarkets, the other half boarded cruise ships or planes.

The instructions remain confused­ or inconsistent or slow to arrive, leaving the federal governme­nt open to criticism that it should have moved harder and faster to complete lockdown as many other experts had suggest­ed. Waiting saves jobs yet spreads the disease, again leaving the gov­ern­ment open to criticism that its priority is managing an econo­mic crisis rather than a health crisis­ when clearly one has begot the other, a fact Morrison was at pains on Wednesday to say he understood.

Clearly every econo­mic measure to help businesses and workers so far is justified and will soon need to be expanded while ensuring banks remain stable.

In this odd war where there is no frontline, no sanctuary except possibly home as we gradually­ separate from society, no battalions across the oceans to conquer Turkey or liberate Paris from the Nazis, we need to be able to rely on what we are being told by governments.

Above all these days, when there are so many alternative, often inaccurate, sources of news, it is even more important that the information governments disseminate is factual, so it can be reported­ in good faith. Of course governments will make mistakes, such as with the Ruby Princess last week, when unwell pass­engers were allowed to disembark in ­Sydney, with disastrous ­consequences.

This is not what happened with Stuart Robert on Monday after the collapse of the myGov website. Quizzed by journalists, the Government Services Minister who failed to deliver an essential service­ attributed the crash to a denial-of-service attack, implying it had fallen victim to a cyber ­attack. This was irresponsible and dangerous.

Fortun­ately, parliament was sitting, and in answer to a question later, the accident-prone Robert, BFF to Morrison and beneficiary of his patronage, admitted the real cause was overloading from the tens of thousands of Australians thrown out of work. Misleading parliament is a much more serious offence­ than misleading media, which shows why it’s important it sits again before August.

This lack of Centrelink prepar­ation was but one sign the federal government had been forced by Gladys Berejiklian and Daniel Andrews to pick up the pace on measures to stem the spread of the virus. The NSW and Victorian premiers were impatient with the slower progress to lockdowns and were pressing for school closures. They acted deliberately and in concert on Sunday to announce stricter social-distancing laws and shutdowns of non-essential businesses.

That compelled the Prime Minister to organise a hook-up of the national cabinet that night rather than wait until the meeting scheduled for Tuesday.

The premiers of the two biggest states, with the greatest number of cases, concerned Morrison was indeed­ putting the economy first, had to pull back a bit from their original plans but it also meant that the Prime Minister was pushed into stricter quarantining sooner than he intended.

It was the first break in the national­ consensus, it was messy and it sparked angry accusations against Berejiklian, particularly over the Ruby Princess stuff-up, although how that differed from allowing passengers off inter­national flights without medical checks straight into the open arms of relatives or into buses, taxis and Ubers is yet to be explaine­d.

Berejiklian and Andrews, deter­minedly unapologetic with their no-regrets policy to do ­whatever they believe is right by their states, will move ahead of Morrison and the other states if they deem it necessary.

No one seriously expects schools in those states to reopen after the holidays. Everyone will be judged later on both their words and their deeds.