Coronavirus: Australians smarter, better people, tempered by the crisis
It has taken a global pandemic to expose the naivety of Australian life and our obsession with the tokens of middle-class success.
There was an innocence almost bordering on a naivety about Australian life in the years leading up to the coming of the coronavirus. We are a colonial people deeply conscious of being cut off from the rest of the world.
As a consequence, we embraced every aspect of the globalisation-is-good mantra including a near obsession with international travel (to Bali and beyond), which many Australians came to associate with evidence of middle-class success and sophistication.
A similar logic applies with our supply lines, which through the years have been extended to nations including (and especially) China. In the pre-corona world, it made sense for Australia to import cheap manufactured product to focus on doing what we do best, namely deliver tourism, gaming, travel, education, property and lifestyle services.
All this worked a treat until last month, when a pandemic exposed the fragility of a globally connected way of life in an island nation such as Australia. We now realise that we need the ability to make not so much complex products, such as motor vehicles, but the simplest items like hand sanitiser and face masks in bulk.
Fortunately, Australian distilleries and breweries pivoted to the sanitiser market and our lone surgical face-mask manufacturer dramatically ramped up production. And while these responses have been helpful, they haven’t met the wider consumer demand. In a pandemic, every day matters; we cannot wait for critical supplies to be manufactured and distributed.
We need to identify the products required in a pandemic (and, indeed, in other calamities) and make sure we have the businesses, the stockpiles and the supply chains to guarantee supplies.
There should be a box of a dozen face masks in every Australian household; that’s 120 million masks right there. And that’s before provisioning for the requirements of the healthcare industry. We need to stockpile personal protective equipment, surgical gloves and hand sanitiser in strategic locations across the continent.
The pandemics that thus far have marked the 21st century seem to attack the respiratory system; we therefore need the ability to locally manufacture (not import) ventilators. Indeed, we need a shopping list of the bits and pieces required on the Australian continent to protect the health and security of the Australian people. And I haven’t even started on our requirements for munitions and other military equipment and supplies as well as the need for, say, a six-month supply of oil reserves.
What I am getting at is that we Australians should reconsider our way of thinking. Instead of reflexively pursuing the most cost-effective solution (outsource to a place of cheap labour and import the product), we need to see the bigger picture and invest in local businesses capable of delivering local products employing local workers.
And in pursuit of this most ennobling of goals, we also require the Australian people to understand that there may be (indeed, there will be) a premium to pay to achieve this level of self-sufficiency. I understand that not every Australian has the capacity to pay a premium for Australian-made products, but every Australian who can pay a premium should do so. And they should take pride in their every single Australian-made purchase.
But why stop at medical supplies? The idea of Australia taking pride in making things, in value adding, should catch on in a nation that has been shaken by a “brush with adversity”, realising that we are isolated.
One thing we do have working in our favour is our agribusiness sector; we produce more than enough food to feed 25 million people. Sure, the supply chain gets jammed with panic buying but generally there’s enough food (and toilet paper) for everyone.
One way we can help build self-sufficiency is to value-add a manufacturing component to agribusiness products. Don’t just produce milk; turn it into butter. Don’t just grow wheat; polish it or somehow add value locally. Our canneries, refineries, abattoirs and timber mills were once the mainstay of vibrant, prosperous regional communities. Sure, all of these value-added functionalities can be done more cheaply by cheaper labour in other nations but where is the nation-building in that logic? Plus, the whole globalisation-is-good logic really is predicated on the free flow of products and capital between nations without interruption.
We are mightily exposed should something disrupt these flows, be it a pandemic, climate catastrophe or — and you’ll love this one — a significant military event including a blockade.
The point is that there is a sovereign risk in an island nation such as Australia building a whiz-bang just-in-time globally connected economy, but without the basic ability to manufacture locally a $2 face mask in sufficient quantities to protect its people.
The issue is that this risk is something that in all probability will surface once a decade, whereas the commercial benefit of outsourcing can be crystallised in this year’s profit and loss statement. And that, right there, is the issue.
Corporate Australia eagerly jumps on board progressive issues; how about we make made-in-Australia the coolest, the hippest, the most progressive movement for the 2020s? How about corporate Australia showing off and showcasing its competing credentials in investing in local manufacturing establishments?
And not only in the cosmopolitan suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne but in also in the industrial estates of the cities and towns of regional Australia? Indeed, go to places such as Warrnambool, Dubbo, Wagga Wagga, Roma, Launceston, Mount Gambier and even tiny Merredin in Western Australia, and you will find local entrepreneurs operating agribusiness, engineering and a range of allied enterprises that have the skills and the resources to make things. The basics are in place, but we need a movement; we need mobilising; we need the might and the will of a determined nation to create demand for a self-sufficient Australia — and indeed the preparedness to pay a premium to cover the cost of Australian production.
We are a vast nation; not only do we need to make things locally, we need to make things locally everywhere. I want every patriotic Australian worker, entrepreneur and any other interested parties, to help find ways of making Australia more self-sufficient.
But our aspiration for Australia beyond the coronavirus should be more than merely achieving a greater level of self-sufficiency. We have a once-in-a-century opportunity to press the reset button and create an even better version of our nation.
I think by the middle of the 2020s, one way or another, our nation will be leaner, more productive, more attuned to the shifting nub of world markets. That which can be digitised will be digitised. The great lockdown has taught us new values and new skills such as shopping online and the overall efficiency of even occasionally working from home.
All these lessons will coalesce to shift Australia from its current comfortable, lowest cost global trajectory. We still will travel, still show off about our cruises and our culinary sophistication.
But there will be a tempering, a caution, and an openness to new ideas about the future direction of our nation. And that’s because we all know there’s a risk this could happen again.
Indeed, there is more to be harvested from the coronavirus than adversity’s toughening. Time spent in close quarters can strengthen many families, clans, couples and communities. Even the much-diminished ideal of the neighbourhood has been rekindled by basic human kindness and concern. It may sound odd, but I think Australia has been strengthened by our experience of working together as a nation, by relying on each other to do the right thing, to ensure that we will never be beaten by a coronavirus.
Let us harness that strength, that galvanised sense of community, and carry it forward in our determination to build an even better Australia in the world awaiting us beyond the lockdown.
Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group.