Coronavirus State of Disaster is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

We can only guess what state Melbourne will be in five weeks from today when the most illiberal peacetime regulations in Australia since the convict era expire. By Nick Cater

Presumably, the city’s population will emerge blinking from their homes and stumble to work, assuming they still have work to go to.

By then, the state of disaster presumptuously imposed by the Daniel Andrews’s government will be closer to becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, with Victoria dragging the nation deeper into an economic hole than we would have reasonably imagined at the start of last month.

These things happen when you put the administrators in charge and make policy decisions on the run with little if any consideration for the damage they might cause. Voters have every reason to be peeved.

Having elected an Andrews government, their state has fallen into the hands of the Andrews administration. They expected a Premier to be in charge of an executive constrained by a parliament.

Instead, their lives are controlled to an intolerable degree by a cabal of senior public servants and a Premier who imposes consequential measures by administrative decree. In so far as Victoria has an opposition, Andrews is it. It is he upon whom Victorians rely to prod and probe the bureaucrats who call the shots. It is he who must challenge the administrators upon whom he has come to rely to solve some the most difficult public policy riddles of our times; the same administrators whose negligence got Victorians into this mess in the first place.

With time, the Andrews administration’s draconian and illiberal stage-four lockdown will come to be seen as a monstrous administrative mistake that has compounded the effects of the blunders that allowed the virus to run wild.

For now, we will just have to put up with it, hoping it will at least slow the general rate of infection, since the government seems incapable of protecting nursing home residents any other way.

Even if it does, we are bound to ask if the result was worth the months that will have been added to the recession, the swelling of the ranks of the long-term unemployed and the shrinkage of the small business sector, the engine of the economy.

Is the policy response, dare we ask, proportionate to the risk? Is it calibrated with due regard to the trade-offs that must be made between conflicting public policy objectives? Was it worth the suspension of basic human freedoms and the disruption of social and family life?

Victoria under administration has assumed some unsavoury characteristics of a totalitarian state. It is a place from which millions long for escape, yearning for the freedom that beckons on the other side of the Murray River.

Those who cross illegally face arrest and up to six months in prison.

The military is patrolling its borders alongside police. Melbourne residents are under house-arrest and face a $5000 fine for breaking the night curfew. Fines are issued by the police, not the courts.

The administrators are deciding how long its citizens can exercise and with whom, how far from their homes they can venture, what goods and services they can lawfully exchange, with whom they can shop, how often they can shop, what they must attach to their ears in public and what time they must return to their home.

The measures are so draconian that China’s official news agency, Xinhua, describes them as strict and the penalties heavy. It reports that “residents are forced into their homes”, starved of contact with the outside world in “Australia’s first ever blanket curfew of a major city”.

“If we didn’t have the footy that would be a disaster,” one resident told Xinhua, the AFL being the opium of the people.

The truth is that Victoria has been a disaster for a week, since the Premier officially declared it to be in the state of one and gave the administrators more power.

Their mistakes shouldn’t surprise. Administrators are paid to administrate, parliaments are elected to think. Administrators find it hard to distinguish between the risks posed by a coronavirus and those posed by something far worse. Politicians are somewhat better at this, particularly when subjected to the cut-and-thrust of parliament.

Administrators, in Victoria at least, have a poor grasp of economics. We know this because they have drawn up a list of “essential” and “non-essential” businesses, distinguishing between jobs that are dispensable and those that are not.

Whether the risks from COVID-19 justify the declaration of a state of disaster is debatable. With fewer than 30 deaths per million, Victoria would be the 100th-most deadly place in the world were it a country.

Deaths in the United Kingdowm are more than 20 times as high, yet its people enjoy considerable more freedom than Victorians do today. Yet the prospect of economic disaster looms larger with every day under administrative control. Youth unemployment in Victoria is in double figures. The future for the state’s biggest export commodity, education, is bleak.

Melbourne’s once vibrant CBD is being hollowed out. Fewer overseas students, the white-collar Zoom revolution, Amazon and locals more than normally spaced out on buses, trains and trams signal a long and painful recovery. With restaurants bankrupt and shops boarded up, it may finally dawn on the locals that tourists are not drawn to their city by the beauty of its river.

The sequel for Lockdown: The Horror Movie is already in production. Alfred Hitchcock at his finest would have struggled to come up with a more menacing title than Sawtoothed Recovery, a phrase that is being banded around by economists.

As recently as a month ago, the COVID-19-induced economic downturn was described in more promising terms, a spring charged with kinetic energy ready to bounce back.

Instead, we face an excruciating encounter with a jagged steel edge, with its inevitable casualties. The pain caused by Victoria’s clumsily executed stage-four lockdown will be vastly greater than the pain saved. Telstra and Brambles chairman John Mullen this week wrote off a U-shaped recovery as “a forlorn hope”.

“I think it is going to be a sputtering-along-the-bottom recovery,” he said. “I don’t see GDP getting back to pre-COVID levels until 2022.”

The effects won’t be confined to the chumps responsible for re-electing Andrews, no matter how firmly the borders are policed. In a modern, integrated economy, the concept of quarantine doesn’t apply.

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