“Dutch disease” is where a country’s success in one sector perversely leads to a decline in other areas.
The classic example is a resource-rich country that benefits from selling, say, oil or gas but where the corresponding appreciation in currency makes most other sectors less competitive.
It is the economic equivalent of a pyrrhic victory: a few insiders win and everyone else loses.
Largely due to what could be thought was good luck, Australia avoided a significant first wave of COVID-19: bushfires in December and January meant tourists — especially from China — slowed significantly, and hotter weather and higher humidity meant conditions were less hospitable for rapid spread of the virus.
Europe, by contrast, was hit hard in March — Italy, then France, Spain and the UK suffered what appeared to be huge waves of infections. This meant the expectations of people in Europe (who were seeing upwards of 5000 cases daily) were anchored at a far higher level to people in Australia (we briefly peaked at 500 cases a day, but most were imported).
So when many European countries got their daily infections down, they started to open their borders and economies (and since then, despite regular warnings, the much-feared second wave never eventuated).
By contrast, Victoria (and even New South Wales to an extent) became a pariah state when its caseload approached 500 (NSW residents were prevented from entering Queensland when it was reporting fewer than 20 cases a day).
Australian citizens and residents effectively can’t leave or enter the country and there are no indications when this will change. This puts Australia alongside North Korea and apartheid-era South Africa in imposing some of the world’s strictest movement restrictions.
While some criticise Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Western Australia’s Premier Mark McGowan for closing their borders, it’s the Morrison government, ostensibly liberal and free market, which appears to be leading the way — refusing to countenance any sort of international border openings and waving through almost certainly unconstitutional state-based border restrictions.
Meanwhile Victoria has become a quasi-police state, all in the name of saving lives from a virus that has so far killed fewer than 400 people in six months.
Police officers can enter a home without a warrant, seize property and arrest people for not wearing masks and housing commission residents are imprisoned in their tiny residences for a week like common criminals.
It seems like our early good fortune may not have been so lucky after all.
Oh please Adam – Australia avoided a huge first wave because
1) it locked down its borders – starting with China in February and sealing the rest in March
2) it, with the exception of the Victorian quarantine failure, has generally managed an excellent test, trace, isolate system.
3) we implemented and abided by restrictions.
This was not luck.
We have by and large had outstanding leadership and great cooperation between the states and federal government. We are so incredibly lucky to have had this. So it really galls me to hear you talk about luck.
Furthermore there are two paths with this virus
1) you keep the cases at or near zero and people can go about leading fairly normal lives (especially important if the country has had minimal cases with little community immunity)
2) you leave things open and unrestricted and you face endless months where sensible people are too scared to do normal things. That is where the US is and where France and Spain are fast approaching again. Society and the economy cannot function like that.
And you can easily move from the first stage to the second stage in a few weeks if the country does not take quick action. The idea of tolerating an acceptable number of cases and deaths as Adam suggests is just playing Russian roulette with our health and the economy.
Adam, I believe you are writing about Victoria more than you are about Australia over-all, and it may help to put the scale of the recent suppression failure in Victoria into perspective.
For Aug-18, Poland has posted 695 daily confirmed cases, Pakistan 664, and Kuwait 632; Puerto Rico has posted 563 daily confirmed cases, Nepal 561, Kenya 491 and Italy 487 [1]
Yet at its worst, Victoria by itself posted a horror 695 cases in a single day. That makes this cock-up not an embarrassment but a disaster of international scale. At the growth-rates of the time, Victoria was only a fortnight away from having the same daily case-rate as the UK does nationally today.
So yes, a drastic intervention was needed and that is not a consequence of Australia having too much luck but of ineffective policy implementation in a high suppression policy that requires prompt detection, effective tracking and tracing, relies strongly on community and industry compliance, and uses isolation as its principle suppression mechanism.
You have previously disagreed with Australia’s suppression policy for rather weak reasons and that’s okay: you can find better reasons if you research better.
But what you are whining about today is the cost of an intervention required by national policy and that is not a product of too much luck, but ineffective state and national implementation and weak regional engagement.
It’s a terrible ongoing cost arising from an avoidable disaster that in a matter of weeks, put Victoria’s transmissions onto the international Covid-19 incompetence league tables.
Your analysis should start there.
“Yet at its worst, Victoria by itself posted a horror 695 cases in a single day.”
725 and 723. Perhaps 695 is a rolling average?
694 on the 4th of august has been Victoria’s highest day so far
Yes– Amark. The data I had was 694 which I accidentally typoed into 695 after typing in that number from Poland. I sourced from https://www.covid19data.com.au/trends, used by several media outlets.
These numbers can sometimes settle over the week after initial announcements but I’ve been tracking them weekly and the 694 figure has been pretty stable.
Based on what is coming out of the Victorian judicial inquiry – that 90% of cases occurred from one contact in quite unusual circumstances at one hotel – this makes nonsense about claims of “international incompetence league tables”. Any completely untried system put in place at 48 hours notice will have some failure rate, including by random chance.
Getting increasingly sick of armchair pundits with 20/20 hindsight pointing out the shortcomings of people working flat out 24/7 without those advantages.
Graham wrote: Any completely untried system put in place at 48 hours notice will have some failure rate, including by random chance.
Graham by design, a suppression system intended to open states and regions to stimulate domestic commerce also exposes the entire nation to any major failure.
The Sars-Cov-2 virus, being highly contagious and easy to transmit without symptoms, means there’s a steady background risk of local community outbreaks, and the likelihood of these, along with the risk of them expanding into widespread community outbreaks, are pre-known conditions of the policy Australia has adopted. To believe the policy sustainable and effective is to wager that we can rapidly ease restrictions.
Therefore our capacity to plan for and respond to local failures (as opposed to assuming no failure anywhere) is part of our competence measure – seen in our ability keep community outbreaks small, and to rapidly detect and suppress larger community outbreaks before they become major metro, state-wide or national issues.
Graham, do you believe that has occurred?
The Victorian lockdown is a necessary, regrettable emergency response to policy implementation failure that was big enough to be reported internationally, and whose State transmission rates exceeded those reported daily by developing nations.
Everyone feels for the situation in Melbourne at the moment — and every Eastern coastal state has now suspended its plans for further restrictions easing.
Do you wish to argue that it’s the national policy implemented correctly and working as planned?
If so, please specify how many more Stage 4 capital lockdowns are planned and budgeted for, for the remainder of FY21.
There is no doubt that it is necessary to identify failures that occurred so as to do better the next time and there will be many next times I suspect.
What I do argue with is the “incompetence” cry which implies that any half-witted bungler could have done better.
For the range of possible outcomes from the policies put in place and hastily implemented in the field, I think the outcome we got was at the better end of the range.
Comparing the Victorian transmission rate based on very high testing with developing country reports based on testing virtually no-one is just not valid.
Graham wrote: What I do argue with is the “incompetence” cry which implies that any half-witted bungler could have done better.
I think the necessary minimum competence is defined by our objectives, and therefore measurable.
I have explained how the minimum can be determined by what we knew about the virus and continued to learn, and what was reasonably required in our risk management in order to meet the stated policy objectives.
The rest Graham, is you reacting to your own invention: a rhetorical retort to a straw-man that had little to do with what I actually wrote.
Graham wrote: Comparing the Victorian transmission rate based on very high testing with developing country reports based on testing virtually no-one is just not valid.
Except that there were first-world countries also represented among the examples I cited including some thorough testers; and I also pointed out how soon Victoria’s rate would have hit the UK’s, had an emergency intervention not been staged.
So now I think it falls to you to answer: what reasonable minimum evidence would represent an objective demonstration of incompetence to you?
Or put it another way: how much worse do you need it to get than a Stage 4 lockdown in the country’s second biggest city economy, paralysing for months a nation that had planned to function with eased domestic restrictions until a vaccine could be sourced?
And if words like ‘smug’ and ‘hubris’ turning up in Royal Commission discussions don’t bother you, what additional words would?
> Any completely untried system put in place at 48 hours notice will have some failure rate, including by random chance.
um the Victorian quarantine hotels had been operating for a couple of months before the unmitigated disaster occurred. Your argument might hold true if it had occurred at the start of March but it occurred at the end of May. More than ample time for the state government to iron out any issues at the quarantine hotel.
Now compare that to Spain at 3700 yesterday. If you look at NSW they dodged a quaratnine disaster by sheer good fortune. Security guard working at several sites got COVID from a US traveller, we don’t know how.
I’m no fan of the Morrison government but credit where it’s due.
They must be under enormous pressure from their mates in big property, big retail, higher education et al to reopen Australia’s borders.
And in the process give away the single most important factor in our low infection rates.
To their credit they’ve held the line.
Are we on the same planet? The feds have dragged their feet and only, to their credit, acquiesced in the face of the States deciding to do something.
By which point, of course, the right will be comparing us to North Korea or the Death Star, or political fantasies beyond even that.
G. Rundle
This puts Australia alongside North Korea and apartheid-era South Africa in imposing some of the world’s strictest movement restrictions.
A. Schwab
Bingo.
Oh boy – Schwab’s logic has always been somewhere between motivated reasoning and Mark Latham but seriously – deriding health restrictions on the basis that the virus “only killed 400 people” – just ignoring that low toll was only achieved because of the very restrictions he claims aren’t needed. Throw in some hyperventilating rhetoric about North Korea and police states and can we please, please send him off the News where he belongs.
Most of those happened in one state in the last month.
But that’s immaterial, Wayne; it’s still a circular argument. We only had xxxx cases BECAUSE of the restrictions put in place. Schwab and other anti-restrictions people can’t get their heads around that, or the precautionary principle.
I agree with you. Just trying to point out the fallacy of “only 400 cases in 6 months”.
It is about 350 cases in 1 month in Victoria from this latest outbreak.