The real ‘China virus’ killed our self-sufficiency years ago

It’s all very well worrying about the environment of the future, but what if we can’t keep alive the ­people living in it now?

Only a week back in Australia, at the point when corona complacency really started to became alarm, when people stopped poking fun at the panic buying of toilet rolls and started doing it themselves, some of us were still sharing an old Yes Minister clip, about how to deal with a crisis.

“In stage one, we say ‘nothing’s going to happen’” the first Whitehall mandarin intones. “In stage two”, chimes in his companion, “we say ‘something may be going to happen but we should do nothing about it’. In stage three, we say ‘maybe we should do something about it but there’s nothing we can do’. In stage four, we say ‘maybe there’s something we could have done but it’s too late now’”.

This touch of grim humour has coincided with nearly every country racing into something like lockdown: in order to avoid China’s experience of 80,000 cases and 3000 deaths, before draconian measures seem to have stopped coronavirus in its tracks; and to avoid Italy’s even worse experience of 35,000 cases and 3000 deaths, that the shutting of restaurants and bars, the cancelling of sport, the closure of schools and universities, and the banning of all non-essential travel seem not yet to have appreciably slowed down.

Right now, in most major countries, international flights are stopping, gatherings of more than a handful of people are banned, and everyone who can is working from home. Dealing with a health crisis, that’s been brewing for two months, has unleashed an economic crisis, in just two weeks, the likes of which almost no one has ever seen.

So based on seven years’ experience as a cabinet minister and two years’ as prime minister, here’s my take on the course of this crisis so far — and, believe me, calling it a “crisis” or even an “emergency” now we know, from watching it unfold, that it could easily swamp the hospitals of first world countries is not fake news.

Once it was clear that, this time, we really did have a crisis on our hands, quite rightly, governments have prepared for the worst.

In my home state of NSW, for instance, the chief health officer has guesstimated that 20 per cent of the population could contract coronavirus in coming months. With Spanish flu, a century back, fully 40 per cent of the population of Sydney were thought to have been sick, so this could be a big under-estimate. But even that’s still an extra one and a half million sick people.

And even if only 20 per cent of those require hospitalisation, that’s an extra 300,000 people needing admission on top of the million and a half that could normally be expected to be hospitalised over the next six months. And even if only 20 per cent of those require an intensive care bed, say for three days on average, that’s 180,000 extra intensive-care-bed days, on top of existing requirements — in a system with a normal capacity of only 180,000 intensive-care days in total.

Yes, it’s the very old and the very sick who are by far the most vulnerable, but no one is safe when the health system collapses from a disease that’s at least as contagious as the common cold, but far more deadly than the standard flu.

It’s precisely because Italy did not react until it was too late, that the hospital system there has been at least temporarily overwhelmed; with doctors having to decide who will live and who will die, based on the availability of beds, rather than their ability to treat people. And let’s face it, death today is even more dreadful than it used to be; no longer the new beginning of religious belief but a final end.

So once the danger became apparent, democratic governments would much rather be accused of doing too much too soon, than too little too late.

Interestingly, it’s been ostracised Taiwan that’s set the “gold standard” for anticipating and combatting the corona crisis. Perhaps because it sensed that more was really amiss, Taiwan started screening, tracking, testing and isolating everyone arriving from the Wuhan epicentre of the outbreak, just five days after the Chinese government first confirmed a new type of flu on December 31. In “Taipei and regions” as the World Health Organisation delicately and deferentially puts it, so far there’ve been just 53 confirmed corona cases and just one death, despite hundreds of thousands of visitors from China every month.

Understandably, no one wanted to single-out visitors from China, but the later countries started to respond, the harder it’s been to contain. And the more drastic the isolation measures, the more grave the subsequent economic crisis. This already looks much worse than the economic shock of 2008, which didn’t close borders, banish crowds, and curtail social life. At some point, the economic costs will start to outweigh the health risks; but that’s months away, and in the meantime, all the businesses and workers whose cash flow has dried up need economic life support.

Hence, for all governments, while the crisis lasts, everything else, at least temporarily, has had to be postponed.

At a time of fear, no-one thinks that a budget surplus should take priority over health spending or over guaranteeing lines of credit for businesses to pay their bills and to keep their staff until more normal life can be resumed. A country that gives social security to farmers during droughts, shouldn’t hesitate to provide “exceptional circumstances” income support to everyone who can’t work due to the corona crisis. And with much business suddenly in free-fall, a commitment to markets and smallish government hasn’t stopped Australian officials from reminding bankers and landlords of their civic duty to consider interest pauses, rent holidays, and foreclosure moratoriums to people who temporarily have no cash flow.

The challenge here: is not to let the health emergency produce an economic emergency that’s even more harmful in the long-run.

There’s had to be a balance between reassuring people that all is as-well-as-it-can-be, and triggering panic; so most governments have tried to level with the public early so people weren’t even more shocked and frightened when things turned out to be as bad as they feared.

In Australia, the health minister had been talking about the potential consequences of a pandemic since the end of January, when the first cases of coronavirus started to appear outside China. Our prime minister announced that we were putting our pandemic plan into action fully two weeks before the World Health Organisation announced one.

The big exception was China, where the doctors who first warned of a new killer disease were publicly shamed. Then, as soon as ferocious social distancing, like the house-arrest of a whole province, had pulled the country back from the brink, there was a self congratulatory book about how the leader and the party had saved the day — or at least there was, until it was mocked out of existence even on China’s strictly-controlled social media.

As always, President Donald Trump has been a magnet for criticism, but there’s nothing racist in keeping your country safe by quarantining travellers from places with disease, and appealing to people’s patriotism.

Spontaneously in Australia, businesses have announced that they won’t penalise customers who can’t pay their bills just now, and supermarkets have changed their opening hours to make it easier for old people to shop.

Boris Johnson in Britain, has candidly admitted that there would be deaths, accepted that the country wasn’t as well prepared as it could be, and started urgent talks with manufacturers for the crash-production of ventilators — just like Winston Churchill once cheer-led the production of munitions and then mobilised industry to produce Spitfires.

Because you’ve noticed, haven’t you, that in this time of crisis it’s “every country for itself”; you’re on your own. When things are bad, no one looks to the United Nations for help. They know it can only come from their own sovereign, national government.

Back in 2004, as fears were growing, back then, about a possible bird flu pandemic, and I was the Australian health minister, we spent more than $100 million to virtually corner the world-supply of anti-viral drugs. It was a small price to pay, I reckoned, to protect the country against a deadly threat. I didn’t want to be the “yes minister” type who copped it for complacency, against a threat that was not certain, yet could come at any time.

But what so many countries are now discovering is their dependence on global supply chains (and ultimately their dependence on other governments) for a host of products that don’t normally seem that important; but are suddenly realised to be absolutely critical in a crisis, like the 80 per cent of the basic ingredients of all the world’s pharmaceutical drugs that are reportedly sourced from China.

Now, I’m in favour of freer trade because it eventually produces greater wealth. As the prime minister who finalised trade deals with Australia’s three biggest trading partners, including Japan,

I’m not just a theoretical free trader but someone who’s actually made it happen.

It’s not freer trade that’s the problem, but freer trade with people who don’t really believe in it: its one-sided implementation by countries that see trade as a strategic weapon and the somewhat naive way most democracies have let our strategic rivals exploit it. So if good is to come from this crisis, it must focus countries’ minds on the need to be self-reliant as well as rich.

This has been the real “China virus”: not the contagion sweeping out of the wet market of Wuhan, but our over-dependence on just one country, not just for inexpensive finished goods, but for vast swathes of our supply chain. This has been our deepest complacency, trading off long-term national security for short term economic gain; giving up deep things for shallow ones.

Not too late, I hope, we can now ponder whether a self-respecting country can afford not-to-have some serious capacity for manufacturing, when it comes to essential drugs and vital health equipment, as well as sophisticated electronics, and the wherewithal of national defence. Can we ever afford not-to-have adequate stockpiles of essential commodities (such as fuel, let alone lifesaving drugs) on hand here at home? I doubt it very much.

Try telling the governments now desperately seeking ventilators and even surgical masks that necessities can always be bought from abroad. So globalism is down and patriotism is back, as nations ready themselves to cope without even their most trusted partners. On ventilators, for instance, Italy has one domestic manufacturer — that’s postponed until-further notice the delivery of every single foreign order. Of course they would. So yes, we will be able to buy these alright; but only once the countries that make them, or have them, are sure that they have more than enough for themselves. In other words, once the crisis has passed. That’s why it has to be the settled policy, even of market-oriented governments, to keep a broad and deep manufacturing sector, come what may.

Of course, the ultimate heroes of the corona crisis will be the developers of an effective vaccine or some other means of triggering the body’s immune system. But even if the intellectual property were made freely available (as it should) any new drug would still have to be manufactured; and it’s certain that no country would allow its export until every last one of its own citizens had been protected.

Even this crisis, though, eventually will end; because there’s a vaccine, or because the virus loses its virulence — and our challenge between now and then will be to avoid letting this needlessly weaken us — and if possible, to emerge stronger for the test.

It has been a long time since the citizens of any Western country have had to worry even about serious inconvenience, let alone immediate deadly threats and instant disruption to the entire population. And, who knows, perhaps the gravity of this crisis might put some of the largely confected crises into perspective.

We should never, ever give up on our ideals but we do need to jettison our delusions.

It’s all very well worrying about potential dangers a few decades hence, but what if we can’t cope with a real danger now? It’s all very well worrying about the environment of the future, but what if we can’t keep alive the people living in it now?

As this sinks in, Australia might start building base load power stations and new dams, to stop handicapping our own prosperity. Japan might start having more children, so a fine country and a deep culture doesn’t fade into obscurity.

In just a few short weeks it’s become screamingly obvious that we can’t be good global citizens without first being strong and capable countries — look at the way the nations of the European Union have tried to close their borders, only to realise that they had no ready way of doing it.

So the necessity for painful choices has once more shouldered its way into our consciousness. We will need to keep it there. The best thing the corona crisis could do is force us to be relentlessly practical, and to stop fantasising that problems will go away of their own accord, without effort and sacrifice on our part.

Tony Abbott is a former prime minister of Australia. This is his address to the Worldwide Support for Development forum in Tokyo on Thursday.