Coronavirus: Honour the heroes of this battle — and fight to stop it happening again

The queue outside the Centrelink office in Southport on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Picture Glenn Hampson

As I sit down to write this, I noticed on Sky News a few moments of coverage of the coronavirus crisis gripping the world.

It was a picture of the ever-growing queue outside a Centrelink office. The sight of a long line of people sitting on socially-distanced milk crates was as sad as it was amusing. The impact this new cohort of jobless will have on the federal budget will be major and no doubt it will eradicate the fading hopes of the surplus, which Josh Frydenberg has worked so hard to deliver.

The dole has to be paid out to more and more people and the strain on the health system will be way too big for the state governments to handle on their own.

The call has gone out to retired nurses and doctors to return to the coal face and help in these difficult times. The hackneyed sayings of old, such as all “hands-on deck” and “shoulders to the wheel”, have never been more meaningful or appropriate.

Federal cabinet and the expanded national body with the states and the commonwealth are in constant consultation.

We appear to be on a wartime footing — and we need to be.

Rarely will challenges like this occur and I hope we all remember vividly what is happening to us now so we can avoid or minimise the damage by better preparation in the future.

Again and again our frontline police are called upon when the going gets tough. Now we are asking them to enter private property to ensure the rules are being observed. If they push hard to maintain the law, they will no doubt be accused of being overzealous.

At this stage a little zealotry would not go astray. Let us also not forget that, just like doctors and nurses, police are coming into close contact with people suffering from this ailment and the risks they take are as obvious and they are frequent.

That is why I hold the police in such high esteem. Their courage is to be admired and so is that of Li Wenliang, the doctor in Wuhan who first drew the world’s attention to this debacle. The disease killed him but his desperate efforts to awaken the regime under which he lived merits a statue in his honour.

Another fear situations such as this always seems to create in me: How long can we use antibiotics as our main defence again bacterial infections?

The bugs are winning this war by building up their immunity to our one and only defence system. The super bugs found in hospitals are proving harder and harder to kill.

We are appallingly wasteful with penicillin and want it or one of its many derivatives prescribed to us every time we sneeze or get a headache. I have not seen any reports that we are on the brink of discovering a new class of medicines to fulfil that role.

Perhaps it is time to divert some of the best young minds away from the law faculties and back into science, or engineering for that matter.

At the risk of being pilloried I am also more than a little concerned at the requirements which must be met to enter teaching colleges at our universities. A final mark in the low 60s seems to be all that is required. That seems pretty low for those who will mould our children’s future.