Coronavirus: Morrison is first among leaders as world order changes

Scott Morrison could become Australia’s most important war- time leader as this crisis unfolds.

Scott Morrison talks to the media in Canberra. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison could become Australia’s most important war-time leader. His Friday talk with the nation was the best iteration so far of his critical ongoing dialogue with Australia, and Australians.

His tone keeps evolving. It hasn’t always been perfect. But it’s getting better.

Morrison spoke unambig­uously as a wartime leader: “I thank you for the great job you’ve done this week, Australia.”

Then he gently scolded the ­recalcitrants and announced the kind of civil liberty-busting measure justified only in a wartime situation: all Australians returning from overseas will be kept, forcibly if necessary, in quarantine for 14 days at hotels or other facilities in the city where they arrive.

Every global leader will be judged forever on how they get their countries through this crisis.

China’s Xi Jinping started disastrously. Beijing began by ignoring the problem, punishing those who raised the alarm and not ­levelling with the international community, thereby potentially delaying preventive action. But once Beijing focused, it moved heaven and earth to fight the virus.

Although locked in a spasmodic propaganda contest with Washington, Beijing under Xi now shows signs of turning this crisis into an opportunity for geo-­strategic and economic gain. And even the propaganda war was muted by Donald Trump praising Xi personally after their phone call on Friday.

Trump’s early response to the virus was mixed. He got one thing right. In late January, against the advice of the World Health ­Organisation, he banned direct travel from China to the US. Beijing was outraged. And yet, as the wheel of this virus, Beijing itself banned most international travellers. On the other hand, Trump made foolish statements, suggesting the virus could disappear in the northern spring, that his administration was on top of it.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, like everyone else, underestimated the problem. His scientific advisers initially considered a strategy of “herd immunity”, allowing the virus to pass through society, keeping the most vulnerable isolated. This might knowingly have allowed for half a million Britons to die. And that is unacceptable for any democratically elected government.

There was discussion of “senocide”, the needless killing of older people, in the British press. The UK now has 12,000 COVID-19 cases and nearly 600 deaths.

Johnson was at first reluctant to order his people to do anything. But persuasion didn’t work. Now the UK is in a severe lockdown.

Johnson has abandoned his happy, jokey, verbally clever, show-off style that was so distinctive. Flanked by medical experts, he now speaks hard truths plainly.

There will be a lot of deaths.

Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is so far riding high. A blend of good luck and good management means that although Germany has nearly 40,000 cases, it only has a couple of hundred deaths. This reflects the strength of the German bureaucracy and health system. But any leader who presides over success, as Merkel has done, deserves what plaudits they get.

One fact is simple: Germany has more intensive-care beds per capita than any other large European nation. COVID-19 passes a ruthless judgment on each country’s healthcare system. Berlin was lucky. Germans who first got the virus were young people returning from holidays in Italy. Young people mostly don’t die.

Germany responded early and tested widely. It still bears the marks of a social reconstruction desperate to learn the lessons of the hideous Nazi past and all its polarisations and hatreds. As a ­result, it remains a co-operative and compliant society.

Giuseppe Conte in Italy and Pedro Sanchez in Spain get terrible marks. Italy and Spain were slow to respond to the virus and have shocking infection and death rates to show for it.

France also has a high case load and, like other European nations, was slow to wake up. But President Emmanuel Macron has announced increasingly tough measures, and his poll numbers have risen sharply.

There is a general “rallying around the flag” dynamic at work, as there was in the first stage of the terrorist breakout after 9/11. However, this may be a phase effect. A new class of crisis leads voters naturally to look to their governments for help and leadership. Then, as the crisis becomes more familiar, the normal grumbling sets in.

The countries that have really done best — Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong — have fairly low-key leaders. But they have caseload experience with previous virus outbreaks such as SARS and H1N1. They are hierarchical and co-operative societies. This is true even in Hong Kong. Its passionate democratic rebellion is so remarkable precisely because it is generally so peaceful.

But no matter how much national leaders have been tested so far, they are likely to be tested even more severely in the months ahead. The course of the virus is unpredictable, but it is unlikely to be conquered until a vaccine arrives. That will take time to administer in rich countries, and even longer in poor countries.

And there is no guarantee an effective vaccine will arrive.

The coronavirus crisis is not just a health emergency, and not just an economic crisis, it is more the kind of seismic global disturbance brought about by a sudden world war.

It’s bigger than the global financial crisis of 2007-08. Economically, it bears more of a resemblance to the Great Depression of the 1930s because it is attacking the global economy everywhere. If you are seeking yield on investment, you can’t move from a low-growth jurisdiction to a high-growth jurisdiction, because there aren’t any. If you lose huge export markets, you can’t find alternatives because everywhere is in slowdown, recession or depression.

This most acute phase will accelerate for a while. This week, 3.3 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits. We don’t know when it will pass, nor what the world economy will look like when it does.

As others have suggested, in some ways it more closely resembles the sudden outbreak of World War I. At the beginning of 1914, the world looked out on unprecedented prosperity and globalisation. Then Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a terrorist, who wanted global disorder, and the world was at war.

The war analogy is obviously limited, but it is telling in one key way. What the world will see from governments is best understood not as fiscal stimulus and monetary relaxation, but as a wartime temporary government takeover of big chunks of whole economies. That’s why Morrison’s statements talk not of fiscal stimulus but of economic support measures.

But the challenges of this virus are still in their early stages, for it is also the case that all the geo­strategic conflicts and problems that pre-existed COVID-19 continue. There is no sign the virus will produce peace anywhere. Fighting, terrorism and conflict continue in Afghanistan. Even the Afghan government cannot come together for the purpose of qualifying for more US aid.

As each nation feels its assets and control declining, geo-strategic rivals are likely to look for opportunities to advance their positions. The virus might also bring along a whole new set of geo-strategic and social crises all of its own. India is engaged in a heroic three-week social shutdown to try to get a grip on this crisis. Can the Indian health system really cope if the virus gets away from the government?

And what about those many countries that are much less well run than India? What about the aforementioned Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or all those very challenged states of Africa? The virus could produce civil disorder, health system collapse or even in some cases government collapse and civil war. It could also produce new refugee flows.

So far, Morrison has led Australia well in a time of its gravest crisis since World War II. If he succeeds, he will join a pantheon which at the moment consists only of John Curtin, a leader who got us through, who worried us through, our last existential challenge.

Morrison has hit a powerful formulation by saying that he wants “to save lives and save livelihoods”. It’s good, but don’t overdo it. When he seemed angry at panic-buying — “It’s un-Australian, it’s got to stop” — I thought this tone a mistake, as it seemed as though maybe he was losing control. But in fact it was probably good to convey how urgent the situation really is.

Morrison has come up with some powerfully beneficial innovations. The national cabinet doesn’t mean there won’t be disagreements but it gives the crisis a united national focus and a way of managing disagreements. It fuses the federal government’s resources and the states governments’ service delivery obligations and policing powers. It pulls us together.

Morrison has been rightly pragmatic. He’s thrown ideology out the window. The cherished surplus disappeared very early, and rightly so. He doesn’t make party political points, and nor should he.

There’s plenty that could have been done better. Right across the Australian bureaucracy, there is an extreme difficulty in thinking about or preparing for a real crisis, and that contributes to making responses slower than they should be. But Morrison and key ministers have led the bureaucracy. At the same time, Morrison rightly privileges the leading medical experts.

In a lot of fields, so-called experts do talk a lot of rubbish. But not generally in medicine, because the results are physical and real. And even our most distinguished physicians typically spend a lot of time in public hospitals and are chained to public realities more than many other professions.

The jury is still out on both Trump and Xi. Trump’s declaration that he wants to see churches all over the US “packed” at Easter is irresponsible and almost bizarre. Even if the US is turning the corner by then, and there’s no proof that it will be, a degree of social-distancing will remain important in all societies where the virus exists.

But one of Trump’s great strengths is that he is never bound by what he said yesterday. He abandons foolish positions easily. He is a Manhattan real estate developer at heart and will embrace debt and inflation as central parts of economic recovery. His talk this week that some parts of the US may open up more quickly than others is perfectly reasonable.

Polls give Trump solid support so far. But Trump’s boosterism is still leading him to underestimate the problem and may confuse the American people about how they should behave.

Further, the US health system has grievous gaps. In the end, Trump will be judged on how the US performs in the months ahead.

For Xi, the early mistakes have been rectified. The social shutdown in Wuhan was brutal, but it was effective and saved lives. I believe passionately in democracy, but there is no doubt a totalitarian system has a structural advantage when it comes to things like lockdowns. Beijing will argue its system copes with this sort of crisis better than democracies do.

Because China is a near monopoly producer of so much medical equipment, it has many opportunities to increase its geo-strategic and diplomatic leverage through selective aid and trade.

Xi offered Italy “a health silk road”, linking medical supplies to Italy’s participation in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Many countries will be desperate to attract investment when and if recovery begins. And Beijing, for all its trials, will have a lot of money to spend.

Coronavirus is a tragedy of suffering for individuals and families, a furnace of testing for whole societies, and a decisive crucible for national leaders.

Each leader must give of their best. And say their prayers.