Learning From Lockdown

Like all parents of school-aged children in my state, I recently received an email from the Education Department letting me know that term two will be entirely from home.  I have often fancied the idea of homeschooling, but never imagined it would happen, and certainly not during a global pandemic.  My middle-class assumptions had us trekking around forests and museums, while my teenage daughter became a child genius, and I turned into one of those Pinterest dads making science craft out of egg cartons.

But really it has been a good opportunity to take a closer look at what she is learning in Secondary school.  The evidence shows that the school curriculum is failing our students, with a clear drop in performance over the last eighteen years.  This is demonstrated in the latest OECD Program for International Student Assessment, where Australian kids have fallen almost a full school year behind in reading and science.  They are already being a year behind in maths.  I brought this up to my daughter's teacher at the last interview and was immediately told that this testing is outdated and that children now have a greater ability to think creatively.  Well, that's fabulous — but if my daughter is to fulfil her goals of being a pilot, she'll also need to be able to read and write.  If you pick up a fourth-grade maths textbook from a hundred years ago, it would be almost tertiary level these days.

I have family and friends who are teachers ― and they are wonderful, hardworking educators, who have also upended everything and moved online for the short term.  Overall the problem lies in the National Curriculum, the latest of which was introduced in 2014, and focuses on three key areas:  disciplinary knowledge, skills and understanding;  general capabilities;  and the cross-curriculum priorities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia;  and sustainability.  This centralised curriculum is structured in such a way that these priorities are emphasised and incorporated across all subjects.  The existence of these core priorities results in less time for essential content, such as literacy and numeracy.  The recent school climate strikes show that children are learning more about one side of political activism, with a lot less critical thinking than the curriculum might suggest.  Why does the State mandate these priorities, about which parents have no choice in?

So, will this COVID-19 pandemic lead more parents to think about homeschooling?  Or at least school choice?  Before the lockdown, there were 30,000 students registered for homeschooling in Australia, with each state having their own registration.  Currently, they can choose whether to follow the national curriculum or not.  Most commonly, it is urban, secular parents disillusioned with the test-driven, one-size-fits-all model.

Compulsory government schooling began in the 1850s in Massachusetts, where an estimated 80 per cent of the population resisted, often with guns, until the final outpost surrendered their children in the 1880s ― when the area was seized by militia and the children were marched off to school under armed guard.  Harvard Law School, also in Massachusetts, will be hosting an anti-home-schooling conference in June.  One speaker, Professor James Dwyer says that "the reason parent-child relationships exist is because the State confers legal parenthood".  That gave me chills.  In Germany, homeschooling has been illegal since World War II, and parents must leave the country if they choose this method for their children.

Here in Australia, it was also difficult to enforce, and education became compulsory in the 1870s, apparently to decrease crime and teach children how to be moral law-abiding citizens.  Currently, we spend 5.9 per cent of GDP — $111.8 billion — on education, with 60 per cent of our students in government schools, and the rest in independent.  Are we getting good value for money?  As a dad of three, who has seen a drop in standards, I am going to say no and await the howls.  According to John Taylor Gatto, "In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church, it requires that its teachings be taken on faith."  He also said that "school is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned."  Gatto was an award-winning teacher for nearly 30 years before he announced that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living", and then went into a public speaking and writing career promoting open-source learning and unschooling.  He felt it was impossible for schooling and education to be the same thing.

Most schools have done reasonably well shifting over to this new method for the short term ― the girl is loving all the extra screen time she's now allowed, and maybe this will lead in a business boom for optometrists.  They even have allocated times for exercise, which they record and upload for the teacher to assess.  A brave new world indeed, although it gives a good sense of normality for some of the students.  But only for the students lucky enough to live in a household where they can afford multiple computers and high-speed Wi-Fi.  For the families with parents working from home, or out of work, or especially in abusive households, the idea of education continuing is a fantasy.  But will it make much of a difference, given our already tumbling standards?  While scrolling online, I came across a photo from a friend with a large family.  They have shifted one of the older girls out of her bedroom to convert it into a classroom for all her siblings, and have managed to scramble together enough laptops, iPads, and headphones.  This family also run a small business, and several of the children are competitive athletes.  My friend really has it all together, but she is already aware that this version of homeschooling as mostly just more computer time ― and it's only been a couple of weeks.

Nevertheless, before we know it, children will be back off to school, and life will slowly return to pre-pandemic normality for those lucky enough to still have a job.  But what will the nearly four million students have learnt in this lockdown term?  For the first time in a long time, it will be the full responsibility of the parents.

This Silent Deregulation Must Become A Pillar Of Recovery

The government has hurriedly dumped a large number of costly business rules.  Why would we now want to bring them back?

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a massive expansion of the power of the state ― heavy-handed police action and huge increases in government spending are just the most obvious.

But at the same time, the crisis has also seen a major retreat of state power in other areas ― a wave of deregulation across the economy that has almost no historical parallel.  And these regulatory reforms offer us a path back to prosperity.

The most obvious regulatory reductions have been on the medical frontline.  Some controls over the production and use of medical face masks, ventilators, virus testing and pathology have been relaxed.  Supervision requirements have been reduced for nurses re-entering the workforce.  Regulations have been eased to allow distilleries to produce alcohol-based hand sanitiser.

But the most consequential deregulations have been intended to keep the economy afloat.  Night-time curfews on delivery trucks have been lifted to ensure supermarkets can be more easily restocked, and trading and operating hours restrictions for essential retail have been eliminated.  Liquor licensing has been relaxed to allow restaurants and bars to do home-delivered alcohol.  Construction work can now be done on weekends and public holidays to make up for productivity losses that might come from trying to build while social distancing.

Other reforms have involved the government relaxing its most burdensome regulations.  The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority has eased capital requirements on banks.  The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is reducing its enforcement and surveillance program, announcing that it would now "carefully consider the impact on businesses already under pressure" (this is great, but at the same time reveals a lot about their attitude before the pandemic).

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has even put a hold on the program that embeds bureaucrats in private companies.  This is the program introduced after the financial services royal commission that has government-appointed psychologists observing the ethical standards of senior management.  It was widely derided as "shrinks in the boardroom" ― and it is no longer active because of COVID-19.

THE RULES WE DIDN'T NEED

Even more astonishingly, the communications regulator has suspended Australian content requirements on commercial television and pay TV.  It would be hard to nominate a more heavily defended and politically sensitive bunch of regulations.  And they have now been shelved with almost no comment.

For the past two decades Australian governments have repeatedly announced red tape reduction programs.  Regulatory reform has been a major plank of the Coalition government's agenda.  It was a major plank of the Labor government before it.  But none of those heavily promoted programs have had as much scope and scale as the COVID-19 deregulations.

Those earlier red tape reduction programs focused on the sorts of regulations that nobody was interested in defending.  They tended to eliminate lots of minor rules rather than significant ones.  The guiding principle has been quantity not quality.  Ultimately they were less major economic reform and more tidying up the statute books.

But this time is different.  The regulations that have been suspended are precisely those that are most burdensome.  They are the rules that are most costly to comply with but also least essential to support a functioning economy.

In other words, they are the rules that governments worried about the effect of over-regulation on productivity and economic growth should be very reluctant to reinstate.

This is the conversation to have now.  The pandemic is moving from urgent crisis stage to risk-management stage.  The Reserve Bank governor warns that we are looking at the greatest hit to the economy since the Great Depression.  We need to start thinking about what policy settings will be able to revive the relative prosperity we enjoyed at the end of 2019 ― and pay for all the spending that the government has committed to.

DEREGULATIONS MUST STAY

Making these temporary deregulations permanent should be one of the pillars of recovery.  We cannot assume that the economy will happily bounce back once social distancing controls are lifted.  The damage inflicted by the shutdown on business models and supply chains has made this naïve hope impossible.  The economy needs to adapt to the post-pandemic world ― quickly.  Regulations that prevent this rapid adaptation or prevent firms from establishing new sustainable business models need to be culled.

In a 2016 paper published in the European Journal of Political Economy, the economist Christian Bjørnskov looked at how economic freedom (that is, low taxes and minimal regulation) affected how different countries performed during an economic crisis.  He found that how heavily a country was regulated predicted how quickly it recovered from crisis ― the less regulation, the quicker the recovery.

A lot of the growth in government is likely to survive after the COVID-19 pandemic.  It will be politically hard to abolish free childcare or to return Newstart payments to where they were.  But we're going to need a much more productive and prosperous economy to pay for it all.  So the deregulations done during the crisis should be locked in too.  And the principles that have been established during this crisis ― that many politically popular regulations make it hard for businesses to adapt to unexpected circumstances and keep people employed ― will be needed to guide our policymakers when they return.

As Scott Morrison has said, all workers are essential.  But not all regulations are.

Not A Very Class Act

Despite the health advice consistently provided by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee which says that teachers can and should go back to school, teachers' unions across the country are continuing to dig their heels in and are doing their level best to make sure that this doesn't happen.

The message to the teachers from the Federal Government could not be clearer:  it is safe to go back to doing your job with appropriate measures in place.

The recommendation from the National Cabinet is that "on current evidence, schools can be fully open" and that "attendance at a school campus for education represents a very low health risk to students".

The advice also notes that "appropriate practices must be employed at schools, like at other workplaces, to provide a safe working environment for school staff, including teachers".

However, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said that "we're concerned that our governments are keeping schools closed not from a health recommendation but almost because of parental fear and some reaction in local governments."

It is no coincidence that the politicians who are most opposed to reopening schools are in those states which have the most militant teachers' unions.  Daniel Andrews and his cabinet seem to be in the pockets of the Victorian teachers' unions.

This week, the Victorian Education Minister James Merlino even went so far to say that a Melbourne principal's decision to bring back half of the school students next week is "reckless".

The Education Minister's portfolio is to ensure that Victorian children receive the best education possible.  He should be working to re-open schools as quickly and as safely as possible.  Instead, he is doing his best to ensure that they stay shut.

In NSW, the union is not even prepared to consider implementing Gladys Berejiklian's plan for students to go back from May 11 in a staggered rate so that the schools are ready for full-time schooling to start in July.

In South Australia, the chief public health Officer Dr Nicola Spurrier wrote a twitter message to parents saying that schools were safe to re-open, which the AEU decided to emblazon with the words "Seriously, Spurrier?"

In Queensland, the union is also defying medical consensus by treating to not only close schools if too many children turn up or they run out of cleaning products, but it is also telling no doubt stressed parents that they will have to homeschool until the end of June.

Like everyone else, teachers would have been to the shops, done the groceries, gone for walks, shopped at Bunnings and lined up at Dan Murphy's.  However, according to the unions, going to school presents a higher risk.

In WWII, the unions refused to unload cargo.

The wharfies deliberately sabotaged the war effort by destroying vehicles and equipment, stealing food being loaded for soldiers, holding snap strikes and demanding "danger money" for loading biscuits.

Now the unions are depriving children of an education, and at the same time refusing to give much needed relief to millions of parents who are facing an everyday struggle to work from home and educate their children at the same time.  Perhaps a solution would be to pay those parents the teachers' salaries while the schools remain closed.

Teachers are not being asked to go to the front line of contagion.

During the Spanish flu pandemic in 1919, school teachers were seen to be the best source of essential workers, and were asked to volunteer to become the nucleus of an organisation to establish District Emergency Relief Depots which were designed to assist people disadvantaged by the pandemic.

This meant that teachers went directly to the houses of the very sick and the unemployed.

Most teachers who are sitting at home want to get back to work and to see their students again.  They relish the face-to-face interaction with their pupils — after all, teaching is a vocation.  Most of them see online teaching as wasteful, inadequate and boring.  The unions speak with the voice of the minority.

Teachers' unions are unique because they mostly involve government jobs.  Rather than negotiating with an employer for higher shares of the profits, they instead negotiate for more of our tax dollars.

In a free market, teacher performance and compensation go hand-in-hand, but teachers' unions rely on coercion to increase pay, and they seek to restrict competition through political means.

This may help the teachers' unions, but it is harmful towards children and their parents who pay taxes.

The unions are responsible for many problems in our education system.

Unions do not like competition, so they require teachers to get a university degree because that way they can control what the teachers are being taught.

They demotivate teachers and punish ambition because they are against performance-based pay.  It's almost impossible to sack a bad teacher, and for good teachers ambition and excellence are punished.

They undermine other forms of education, other than online learning, such as homeschooling.

Is it any wonder why Australian schoolchildren are behind in literacy and numeracy?

Teachers' unions say they care about children.  But their actions during the last month or so has sent a loud and clear message, which is that their primary concern is about themselves.

We Cannot Tax Our Way Out Of Debt

These days probably the best way to guarantee the federal Coalition government won't do something is to have Malcolm Turnbull suggest it.  So when Turnbull on the publicity tour for his book raised the prospect of further tax increases on superannuation and investment income, he might well have done enough to ensure they are unlikely to happen.  And nor should they.

Jobs and debt are the two fundamental challenges confronting Australia in the wake of the COVID-19 health crisis.

The only way of addressing these two challenges is by getting as many Australians back into work as quickly as possible.  Increasing taxes does nothing to reduce unemployment that will most probably peak at more than 10 per cent.  Last month, in one week, 780,000 lost their jobs out of a national workforce of 13 million people.

And while tax rises in the short term help pay off debt, in the long term they won't generate the productivity growth required to pay down what could be a total of $1 trillion of federal government debt within three years.

To put the federal government's interest repayments on that number into perspective, at current rates of less than 1 per cent on government bonds, the interest cost equates to about $400 a year for every Australian.  If and when interest rates normalise, at say 3 or 4 per cent, interest payments will equate to $1200 or $1600 per person to be paid every year for decade upon decade.  That soon becomes real money.

Some might say that Malcolm Turnbull and current Labor leader Anthony Albanese have more in common than just the fact the seat in the Federal Parliament the former had, and the latter has, are both in the inner city of Sydney.

FAR TOO MUCH RED TAPE

Turnbull was wrong to float the idea of higher taxes, Albanese is wrong to dismiss the prospect of lower taxes.  "What we need to make sure is that arising out of the crisis, we don't have the government go to the bottom drawer and say, 'What we need is labour market deregulation.  What we need is more tax cuts' for people who don't necessarily need it," Albanese said yesterday.

On the contrary, these policies have sat in the Coalition's bottom drawer for far too long.

As usual, former treasurer Peter Costello got it right when he warned of the "high-tax cheer squad" who will use the current crisis to permanently lift taxes.  As Costello said, far from contemplating tax increases, the Coalition should be aiming to bring forward its personal income tax cuts.  And as he pointed out, "the downturn has highlighted how much red tape we have burdened our society with, in particular financial regulation".

My research released last month revealed that since the late 1970s, while Australia's population has grown annually at an average of 1.6 per cent, and the economy at 2.5 per cent, federal government red tape, measured by the number of rules imposed by government authorities, has increased by 10 per cent a year.

The battle lines of reform are beginning to take shape, and so far the signals from the Coalition are encouraging.

When the Prime Minister, in ruling out a "coronavirus repair levy", said that "increasing taxes doesn't always grow the economy", he was right.  He could even have gone further and said it's a lot easier to find evidence of tax increases shrinking the economy rather than growing it.

Changing the structure and mix of the tax system is important, but it's a medium-term goal for Scott Morrison's next term of government.  A 20-year argument about tax isn't going to be resolved in the next six months.

Instead, the beginning of a reform agenda looks like this:

1. Cut the taxes that already exist ― by bringing forward the government's planned personal income tax reduction.
2. Cut red tape (or at least stop its growth) by implementing a 12-month ban on all new federal government regulation.
3. Make it easier for small business to employ workers ― by exempting small business from parts of the Fair Work Act.

That isn't only an agenda for reform.  It's an agenda to provide what Australia needs most at the moment, which is hope for a more prosperous future.

Stop The World, We Want To Change It!

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic we have been repeatedly told that the only moral position is to defeat the virus at all costs.  Any suggestion that the economic effects of keeping everyone in their homes and shutting down the country warrant our consideration is considered crass or obscene.  If you venture that a bankrupt country is unlikely to be a healthy country, you are liable to be charged with attempted murder.  Instead, the common, or at least loud and angry, refrain is that we must secure public health first, and only then can we worry about the future.

The antagonism proposed here is between those who are (earnestly, righteously) concerned with the lives at stake right now and those who are (selfishly, inhumanely) concerned with how society and the economy that sustains it will look after the shutdown.  If we look more closely, though, we can see who is really exploiting this crisis.

Leave to one side what exactly total victory might require and focus on the extraordinary presentism of this argument.  The strongest version of the at-all-costs position is along these lines:  worrying about the future treats the people of the present, especially those most vulnerable to the disease, as means to our own ends, and not as ends unto themselves.  Hence the claim that anyone worried for the future is willing to sacrifice grandma for the economy, or to go to the pub, or whatever.

Yet this can't be right ― the argument elides the way most people are indeed being deployed as means to the goal of stopping the spread of the disease.  If we were being consistent, this reasoning would also preclude us from coercing individuals to participate in a collective action with an end they may not have chosen for themselves.  The coercion, legitimate and even right in the circumstances, is obviously not based on viewing individual dignity as some sort of trump.

Put another way, the at-all-costs argument is not really that calculation about the future is wrong.  It is instead a specific calculation about the future.  If we say something like, "The greatest good overall will be obtained if our actions now contemplate the future economic conditions of our society", the response is not that such a statement is obscene;  rather it is more that, "The greater good overall will be obtained if we defeat Covid-19 completely, which outweighs any concerns about the future economic conditions of our society".

For most people, this choice is a genuine dilemma.  They can see reason on both sides.  They follow the state's social distancing instructions while anxiously wondering if their jobs will still be there when the shutdown ends.

But if the debate is really just between two different utilitarian calculations, we are left with the question of where the anger (which is entirely on one side of the debate) originates.

Under closer examination, the people pushing the at-all-costs line most vociferously seem to have an ulterior motive.  They hope to exploit the crisis to promote radical changes that would not be considered otherwise.  The crisis can be redeemed if it leads to a revolution in the economic and social arrangements of our country.

Consider:  one factor in how you might determine the two calculations presented is how much value you place on our present economic and social institutions.  If you value them highly, then naturally you will include them in your preferred pandemic response.  But if you think they are of low or even negative value, because they are unjust, then you will not only disregard them from your calculation, but also support pandemic measures that you think are most likely to upend them.  The suggestion we consider existing value ― contained in the businesses and associations that will close, the liberties that will be compromised, and the lives that, because they depend on those institutions, will be lost to despair and ill health ― is outrageous, because it perpetuates injustice.

This is why agitation for the maximal response is usually accompanied by claims about what must change.  The pandemic apparently demonstrates the need to defer more readily to experts, implement a universal basic income, make preschool free, and centrally-fix wages, among other things.  Even banal predictions like the demise of the office and the rise of online education are in this genre.  Some people get angry when told that none of this radicalism is necessary.

Worse still, their radicalism is incoherent.  Our participation in the shutdown is motivated by our duty to society ― as captured by the concept of public health itself.  Each of us is obliged to stop the spread of the disease, even though most of us will not contract the virus.  Public health refers not to mutual goods, but to a common good.  The duty it creates is not owed reciprocally by individuals to one another, but to the society of which we are stewards, having inherited it from our ancestors.  As such, the duty demands we consider our children and grandchildren.  The obligation is the same for every generation:  to provide a future that is continuous with the past.

It is not surprising then that, far from recommending revolution, the pandemic has reinforced the value of traditional goods.  Stay-at-home orders, for example, might not be quite so harsh were more people homeowners than renters of small apartments.  The alienation of social distancing might not be so severe were more adults married with children.  Expert rule might be more effective had the academy and media class not been engaged in generations-long ideological mission creep.  Perhaps borders and self-sufficiency might also have renewed credibility now that globalism has gone viral.

In any event, we are right to worry about what society will look like after the pandemic ends.  We are obliged to do so for the same reason that we were obliged to act against the virus in the first place.  But the source of that obligation argues against conceiving it as a reason for revolution.  The proper conclusion is the exact opposite.

Media Scrutiny Has Shut Down Too

There's a fine line between the government protecting people and punishing them.  It might be that in the context of the COVID-19 crisis that line is about to be crossed ― if it hasn't been already.  Why the health authorities in some states have decided that someone can't sit by themselves on a park bench is just one of the many unexplained aspects of the crisis.

Another unexplained aspect of the crisis is why there has been so little scrutiny from the public or the press of the decisions made by the government and by the health authorities.

Many media outlets are members of the Your Right To Know coalition which aims to make the operations of government more accountable and transparent.  Yet until the last week, with the notable exception of this newspaper and one or two journalists in other organisations, those same media outlets that belong to Your Right To Know have refused to ask of our politicians fundamental questions such as for how long 25 million Australians can expect to be under what is basically house arrest.

The Canberra press gallery has obediently recited the "modelling" offered up by the authorities about the medical impact of the crisis, yet hasn't bothered to ask about whether any government has done any modelling of the social, community, and economic consequences of the lockdown lasting up to six months.

To put it bluntly, much of the Australian media has failed to fulfil some of their most basic responsibilities in a free society, namely to question the government and hold it to account.  With parliaments around the country suspended, the role of inquisitive and sceptical voices has never been more important.

It's gone largely unremarked in the media that the initial justification for the draconian lockdown of the country, which was to "flatten the curve" and prevent the hospital system being overwhelmed, appears to have been achieved.

Likewise, it's barely been commented upon by most of the journalists and commentators writing about the crisis that, beyond flattening the curve, no state or federal government minister has actually revealed to the public what is their strategy to deal with the virus.

That the government as yet has no long-term plan is certainly the implication of the comments by the federal deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth, when he said this week that health advisers were "deeply and thoroughly" exploring measures to combat the virus.

When it comes to telling the Australian public about the health authorities' measures of success or failure in dealing with COVID-19, it's not that so much that the government keeps on moving the goalposts ― it's more like the government has taken them down and buried them, and refuses to tell anyone where they are.  That's not good for democracy.

Too many journalists, especially those at the ABC, are so fixated on signalling their own virtues through their support for a semi-permanent lockdown that they refuse to countenance any alternative viewpoint.  And it might be that part of the reason Liberal MPs are so reluctant to talk about beginning to end the lockdown is because they like, for a change, not being attacked by the national broadcaster.

The lack of debate in this country about what an exit strategy from the lockdown looks like and when it might be implemented is in sharp contrast to what's been happening in, for example, the United States and Britain.

Keir Starmer, the new leader of the British Labour Party, is hardly a radical free-market libertarian, yet a few days ago he expressed a view which in Australia at least has only been heard in places such as the website Catallaxy Files.

Starmer urged the British government to be publish its exit strategy from the lockdown.  He said that some aspects of social distancing would have to be maintained, but:  "We've got to have the trust of the public … for that trust there needs to be transparency and openness."  He said the "silent pressures" on communities "cannot be underestimated" and "to maintain morale and hope people need a sense of what comes next".

Hope and a sense of what comes next is what Australians, at the moment, do not have.

ScoMo, Josh: Without An Exit Strategy We Face Higher Taxes, Higher Debt, A Higher Cost Of Living ― And Little Hope

The $320 billion of fiscal and monetary measures in response to the coronavirus, however necessary, will impose a debilitating cost on all Australians with consequences for years to come.  The government needs to outline an exit strategy from these extraordinary levels of intervention.

The Morrison government is right to prioritise assisting businesses to come through the lockdown and maintain their connection with their employees, but an additional $214 billion of fiscal spending combined with a large hit to government revenue could send total federal government debt on a path toward $1 trillion.

There is no cost-free way to fund this massive expansion in government expenditure.  All spending is funded in one of three ways:  it can be taxed from taxpayers, borrowed, or created by central banks.  All of these methods of funding will come at the expense of Australian workers, families, and businesses.

Taxation comes directly from taxpayers in a very noticeable way, making it the most honest way to finance government spending.  It is also the most moral way, as it imposes the cost of government on the current generation who receive the benefit of government spending.

However, funding government spending by borrowing money burdens future taxpayers who are forced to fund debt repayments and service the interest.  This will mean a combination of higher taxation and fewer services for future generations.  Imposing debt on future generations because of this generation's inability to live within its means should be to our national shame.

Deficit spending can also crowd out private sector debt used to finance productive businesses.  The issuance of government debt puts upward pressure on interest rates resulting in reduced investment and productivity, which in turn reduces wage growth and the quality and quantity of consumer goods and services enjoyed by Australians.

The government has instead turned to the third method ― monetising the debt.  This approach is the most politically expedient, but also highly dishonest and pernicious.

The Reserve Bank of Australia, like many central banks around the world, is purchasing government debt and funding their bloated balance sheet with newly created money.  The RBA's balance sheet has jumped by over $100 billion since February to $278 billion.

The RBA has committed to targeting an interest rate on three-year Treasury bonds of 0.25 per cent until "progress is made towards full employment".  With more government debt about to hit the market from deep deficit spending, the RBA will have to buy up big in order to suppress interest rates.

Unlike the monetary expansion enacted during the Global Financial Crisis, this time the RBA is unlikely to have a mining boom to boost the economy.  Instead, they will be forced to assist an economy coming out of a debilitating shutdown with high unemployment and underemployment, and low levels of investment.  Under these circumstances, it will be very difficult for the RBA to reverse the monetary expansion.

With hundreds of billions of dollars of new money flowing into the economy at a time of economic shutdown, there will be a lot more money chasing a lot fewer goods and services.  If the RBA successfully mitigates credit contraction, we could see significant price inflation.  This would erode the value of accumulated savings and undermine saving and investment that is crucial for productivity and wage growth.  A weaker Australian dollar will continue to raise the cost of living by making imported goods and services more expensive.

Continual monetary expansion also disproportionately benefits the well-connected at the expense of those distant from the money creation process.  Newly created money will flow in to bail out the banks with a flood of liquidity and access to cheap lines of credit.  The stock market and housing market will be reinflated, favouring those in the market at the expense of those outside.  And the cost of living will increase ahead of the wages of a multitude of disconnected workers.

There has been little media attention given to how the Government plans to pay for this massive expansion in spending and no discussion of how the Reserve Bank plans to unwind their substantial boost to liquidity without causing high inflation.

If the Coalition couldn't return the budget to surplus over seven years of economic expansion, it is unclear what circumstances will be required in the future for a government to do so.

After the coronavirus threat has cleared, Australia will need bold leadership to reign in the public debt through reduced spending, less red tape, and a smaller public service with lower pay that better reflects the low-risk nature of their jobs.  If this is not achieved, we will be condemning future generations to a country with high taxes, high debt, and little hope.

We Must Ensure Our Liberties Are Returned As Swiftly As They Have Been Taken

On March 30, New South Wales went to bed in a liberal democracy and woke up in a police state as with a stroke of a pen Brad Hazzard signed into law an Orwellian directive.

The Public Health (COVID-19 Restrictions on Gathering and Movement) Order 2020 was signed into law on that day and was in full force by the morning.  This directive effectively made it illegal to leave the house without a "reasonable excuse".

The effect of this directive is that the people of New South Wales must be able to prove that they are leaving their house for food, exercise, education or work, or medical or caring reasons.

This law gave enormous discretionary powers to the police to enforce this directive and equips them with harsh punishments including fines of up to $11,000 and prison for anyone not complying.

The object of this directive is to enforce social distancing but does so in a manner that is completely disproportionate and vests excessive power with the police.

This directive restricts liberties above and beyond what is required to achieve the object.  Making people to justify being outside, even when they are alone, is extreme.  There is no risk being averted by restricting peoples movement to this extent that could not be prevented by observing them and their adherence to social distancing orders.

Likewise, activities such as walking the dog, reading a book, or getting some sun, are all activities which are illegal under this directive as they do not constitute a "reasonable excuse", and can all be conducted whilst keeping an appropriate social distance.

The Police Commissioner Mick Fuller assured the public that the police would "show discretion", but this is the same police force that was mired with scandal last year for strip-searching minors.

People were shocked to see footage of the enforcement activities of police so far.  One couple in the footage had sat down to have a break from walking and was swiftly moved along.  Surely resting between exercises is an instance for police to apply their much-promised discretion?  Activities incidental to whatever "reasonable excuse" people should not be policed this harshly.  By this standard, people checking out the specials on cleaning aisle when they are left their house to buy bananas could be reprimanded.

Mick Fuller defended the actions of the police saying they have not issued a single fine despite having the power to issue them on the spot.  This is a point that ought to be emphasised.  The average cop on the beat has empathy for the public are finding it difficult to keep up with all the changes in law.  They understand that people have whiplash from all the dos and don'ts over the past month.

Other states have followed with similar pandemic measures of their own, all too often enforced with a contradictory ham-fistedness.

The more important concern here is the swiftness with which powers were gained and liberties lost.

It doesn't take a dyed in the wool civil libertarian to be concerned that within 24 hours the Minister can magic up powers that can turn New South Wales in 2020 into Oceania in 1984.

Extraordinary times may justify measures that would never be acceptable otherwise, but should never be an excuse for excessive use and abuse of power.

A utilitarian might argue that the situation requires that we must trade our freedoms for the benefit of the many, but everyone suffers under mass house arrest by threat of fine or gaol.

The people of New South Wales should mark down the date of 29th of June, that is the day these draconian laws expire but, as with everything that is penned under emergency powers, it can be invoked quickly but slowly revoked.

Australians have a duty to hold their leaders to account and ensure that our liberties are returned to us swiftly as they have been taken.  We must make sure that emergency powers are removed as promptly as they were acquired.

It is said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.  Health and finances for most Australians have become oppressively pressing, but it is essential that we keep an eye on our leaders.

A symptom of coronavirus is said to be a loss is our senses of taste and smell;  a loss of our anti-authoritarian spirit must not be another.  Those with power are not to get too comfortable with it, and the populace must not become accustomed to being lorded over.

If we don't obstinately demand that our liberties returned, we might wake up to a police state every morning.

Beautiful One Day, Police State The Next

To control the spread of a dangerous virus that as yet has taken 24 lives in this country, 25 million Australians have been placed under indefinite house arrest, children's playgrounds are locked and patrolled by security guards, and the police fly drones over beaches and parks.

To control a virus that as yet has infected 5000 Australians, the response of doctors and politicians to this serious health crisis was to create also a humanitarian and an economic crisis.  In the years to come Australians will quite rightly question whether there could have been a better way.

Future generations will ask why the public was so quick to accept the opinions of those experts who presented the worst-case scenarios rather than listen to other experts, no less qualified to offer a judgment, but who suggested less draconian solutions than those that came to be implemented.

Those future generations will also ponder how in 2020 it was that so many Australians could have become so completely disengaged and removed from what happens in the economy that they could advocate policies that would have shut down practically all economic activity in the country.

This is the position of the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, who said:  "The government has a responsibility to deal with this health emergency.  That is the first priority.  Then, it needs to deal with the economic consequences of the health emergency and the appropriate response.  It needs to be done in that order."

Sadly, Albanese seems not to understand that the economic emergency Australia faces involves people's lives in exactly the same way as does the health emergency.

Australians like to joke about how the country's second-most populous state has become "The People's Socialist Republic of Victoria".  But it is no laughing matter that in the space of just a few weeks Victoria became a police state, as its government made laws and then enforced those laws, in ways not very different from how the worst socialist regimes operate.  The New South Wales government ("liberal" in name only) has been quick to follow Victoria's lead.

PASSED WITHOUT SCRUTINY

In Victoria, the most extreme house arrest laws in the country were enacted without parliamentary authority and without any form of public or democratic scrutiny.  They were simply made under an enabling act that allows the government do anything it "considers is reasonably necessary to protect public health".  Using this power, Victoria has enacted house arrest laws that are arbitrary, unpredictable, and that are changed, literally, hour by hour at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats.

On Wednesday morning the Victorian Premier declared that it was against the law for anyone to leave their home for any non-essential purpose, including couples who lived apart visiting each other.  Just before 5pm that day, following a community backlash, the government announced couples would be exempt from the law.

Meanwhile, in New South Wales, police officers harass people sitting alone on park benches.  In 1984, Big Brother at least allowed Winston Smith to go outside.

Jonathan Sumption, a former judge on the UK Supreme Court, gave an interview to the BBC on Monday in which he warned of the consequences of untrammelled power in the hands of politicians and the police.  Everything he said applies to Australia.  Of police operating in the UK in the same way as they are in Victoria and New South Wales, Sumption said:  "That is what a police state is like.  It's a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers' wishes."

It is significant that despite all the coverage it has devoted to the current crisis, the mainstream media in Australia has made no reference to the interview.  It might be that the answer to Sumption's question is too uncomfortable.

"Yes this is serious and yes it's understandable that people cry out to the government," Sumption said.

"But the real question is:  Is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hard-working people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress …"

Comic Books Are Now A Laughing Stock

History will likely say that the comic book industry was sunk by the repressive measures adopted to control the spread of coronavirus.  In reality it is the industry's bizarre obsession with identity politics that ensured the death of this classic storytelling medium was an inevitability.

The partial economic shutdown in the United States and other Western economies is wreaking havoc on comic book shops.  One major retailers' prediction of an "extinction event" was seemingly confirmed only a few days later when Diamond Comic Distributors, the industry's sole bridge connecting publishers and shops, announced it was ceasing operations indefinitely.  Several publishers have already put out a "pencils down" notice to their staff and contractors to stop work altogether.

An economic shock should be costly but shouldn't kill an entire industry.  Other print mediums are still publishing and distributing during this crisis and will survive.  The distinction lies in the comic industry engaging in the kind of self-harm that only a growing economy could (barely) tolerate.  The costs of allowing the medium to be hijacked by propogandists to treat the humble comic book like political pamphlets rather than heroic adventure stories are now being felt.

Market leader Marvel Comics' tone-deaf announcement of a woke new series in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has made the entire industry a laughing stock.  In the face of retailers desperate to know what Marvel's crisis plans were, the publisher in March revealed New Warriors, a reboot of a series which first launched in 1990 but now featuring characters with names such as "Snowflake" and "Safespace".  The former was touted as the company's first non-binary character and the latter described as a "big, burly, sort of stereotypical jock" with pink hair and a matching pink onesie.  Words alone can't describe the visual cringe of the promotional material.  This is not the work of a satirist mocking social justice — this is an actual entertainment industry in 2020.  Unsurprisingly, this has garnered some attention in the mainstream press.  Broadcasting to normal people that they should stay away from the market leader — and by inference the shops that sell their books — couldn't have come at a worse time.

Unfortunately this is not a new development.  In two articles for The Speccie in 2018 and 2019, I described how "a destructive force in a creative industry" have reengineered the medium to prioritise "representation" and to be a platform of social justice activism.  Classic characters were reinvented with new gender or cultural identities and the stories were increasingly steeped in the post-2016 anti-Trump derangement of the artists, writers and editors.

The efforts have been commercially unsuccessful.  Years of declining sales and closed stores — at a time when superheroes have dominated the box office — have not been addressed.  This makes sense if the underlying agenda is not to generate sales and the major publishers are just small subsidiaries of corporate conglomerates who will absorb the cost as the price of showcasing their diversity.

The hidden cost of agenda-based storytelling is that an entire generation may grow up without the kind of stories of heroism that are important to a society.  Addressing issues about personal responsibility, selflessness, good judgment and justice in a mainstream setting has significant cultural value.  Travis Smith, the associate professor of political science at Concordia University in Quebec noted in his book Superhero Ethics that "treating superheroes as metaphors turns them into examples of power and freedom that we can use to improve our own lives".

"Cultivating responsibility in others and ourselves is our duty, and this is done not only by providing living examples to emulate but also by telling stories to educate;  we are more receptive to analogies than commands," Smith says.

The traditional superhero could once reliably exemplify or aspire to represent the four cardinal virtues:  prudence (the ability to discern the appropriate course of action in a given situation), courage (the ability to confront fear, uncertainty, and intimidation), temperance (restraint, self-control and sound-mindedness) and justice (fairness and righteousness).  But these ideas are incompatible with the moral relativism at the heart of modern progressivism.

Holding a relativistic worldview means rejecting objective truth.  This is why progressives can't tell heroic stories.  Since they don't believe in right and wrong, the only virtue their "heroes" can possibly possess is their identity.  They are heroic just by existing.  Social justice, the progressive value which is concerned with the redistribution of wealth and privileges in society, is an inherently totalitarian ideology that elevates group identities and collectivism above individualism and freedom.  Membership of the group identity comes with it the obligation to express prescribed political beliefs.

At Marvel the obsession with political activism is a company-wide commitment.  In late 2019, the publisher released Hero Project, a documentary to showcase the "heroism" of children advocating for political causes.  Episode 5 featured a 12-year-old transgendered girl who "became actively involved in LGBTQ support when the Trump administration took a firm stance against rights for trans students".  The person in charge of Hero Project is Sana Amanat, a mysterious senior executive at Marvel who was handed the mission to be the company's political commissar.  When Amanat was plucked from obscurity to be an editor in 2009, an executive told her she had "something different to offer" and "they need her voice in order to change Marvel".  All the entertainment companies have their own Sana Amanat's spearheading a range of new woke television programmes, films and literature designed to challenge the primacy of white males in society by giving representation to marginalised groups.  Star Wars, Terminator, Ghostbusters, and Men in Black are some of the long-running franchises that have recently committed to representation but failed to inspire or entertain.

The market for comic books was an early adopter of woke entertainment but proved that the reinterpretation of heroes doesn't sell.  In November 2018, in this magazine, I noted that "the industry limps on, infected with an ideology that values propaganda over capitalism".  In 2020, this ideology may be a luxury that a post-coronavirus world will refuse to indulge.

Australia's Other Plague: Incestuous 'Intellectuals'

Few images better capture the out of touch and incompetent nature of Australia's self-described elites as three university academics playing word games to describe the economy as "hibernating" while the lives of millions of normal Australians are being destroyed and disfigured, some permanently.

According to reports in the Nine papers (April 1, 2020), three academics from the Australian National University developed the term "hibernation" to describe the shutting down of the Australian economy as a consequence of the social distancing measures enacted by state and Commonwealth governments.  The term is meant to capture the temporary nature of the crisis.

This is no temporary crisis.  This is a tragedy of biblical proportions.

Many of the Australians who will become unemployed over the next six months will not simply go into hibernation, to then thaw out and resume business as usual.  They will never work again.  Their wages will never recover.  Their lives will never be the same.

Precious moments will be lost and never recovered, like all of the grandparents who can't see their grandchildren.  Like all of the elderly who are trapped isolated, alone and afraid in the homes.  And like all of the Australians who have had destroyed in just days the small businesses they built up over years.

Perhaps if you work at a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funded organization protected by government from competition or wage cuts then it is easy to practice social distancing and talk via Zoom or Skype to play clever word games which mischaracterize reality.  It is also not a surprise that the secretary of the Treasury Department, Steven Kennedy, is an alumnus of the ANU, as are many of his colleagues at Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia.  Such is the incestuous nature of Australia's expert class.

One wonders if any of those involved in the development of the hibernation strategy have ever looked a colleague who has a family and a mortgage in the eye and told them there are not enough customers coming through the door to keep them employed.

If universities wanted to be helpful, perhaps they could open the doors of the dormitories once filled with thousands of foreign students to those who need to be put in quarantine, rather than being put up at taxpayers' expense in five-star accommodation.  Or perhaps universities could stop the persecution of those such as Professor Peter Ridd, now the subject of an appeal against his sweeping legal victory last year, to allow for the free exchange of ideas and opinions which is so crucial in a time of uncertainty.

Or perhaps, instead of wasting taxpayer dollars on research programs which tell Australians what awful, racist, and bigoted people they are, the universities could analyse how Australia could improve its pandemic response ability.  On this last point, my research found identity politics was the single most common theme in the historical studies discipline to receive funding under the Australian Research Council's Competitive Grants Program.

Famous conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton argued that "intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it."  Trouble is, the intellectuals are in charge ― and only an intellectual could think that our jobs, social relations, and institutions can be temporarily put into hibernation and then brought back to life via government edict.  This is why shared sacrifice is so important.  Those developing the ideas and policies which are putting Australians out of work must themselves have skin in the game and feel some of the pain of their own decisions and advice.

One suggestion is that for every one tenth of a percentage point increase in the unemployment rate (such as from 5.5 per cent to 5.6 per cent), is accompanied by a one per cent cut to the pay of senior public servants.  And if the unemployment rate goes above seven per cent, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Governor of the Reserve Bank must lose their jobs.

Another suggestion is for all of the experts advising the government to be put in front of a rolling set of parliamentary inquiries so Australians can understand the assumptions underpinning government decisions.  It would be interesting to see if the health experts who modelled the impact of the coronavirus also modelled the social, cultural, and institutional impacts of economic depression.