Australian labour market in dire straits

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1. Queensland has had very little in the way of lockdowns compared to New South Wales and Victoria. But we do seem to have taken something of a hit to employment, though not nearly in the same league as NSW.

   What we have had is strict lockouts – that is, interstate border closures in addition to the closed international borders.

   With it’s tropical climate, beaches, Great Barrier Reef etc, Queensland probably has a more substantial tourism industry than the other states. I wonder the this is the reason for the employment impact in a state that has remained largely Covid-free?

2. I agree that further fiscal support for workers and the unemployed is needed. Right now is very much the right time in our national history to start implementing a Job Guarantee. Of course, unfortunately, this will never happen under a neoliberal government. The novel zoonoses disease crisis (COVID-19 won’t be the last one) and the climate crisis, with all its attendant crises, are the very time to reconfigure our economy to meet these existential challenges by increasing health, environmental and adaptational sector employment. Private enterprise won’t do any of this, indeed they resist it. So the democratically elected state must step in. We need extensive statist and dirigist measures. We also need to re-nationalize all economically strategic and natural monopoly enterprises WITHOUT compensation to the very rich.

3. @ikonokast,

   Agree with the sentiment eg re nationalisation, buybacks the political reality will probably preclude this. The neoliberal media would go IMO a frenzy and probably convince voters that this is “communism” etc. also don’t forget what happened to the mildly reformist Whitlam government in 1975 and Chile 1973.

   For now I think the best we can hope for is the election of the Labor party, neoliberal lite for sure. I don’t know if they understand MMT and of course their public statements on debt and deficits suggests they do not or do not feel confidant they can re educate the public at this stage.

4. Whether employment and unemployment and the economy are growing or shrinking is of secondary importance. What is of primary importance is whether the economy is delivering to people what they need to thrive.

   Of course that would include intangibles like self- respect and purpose as well as material needs. But during times like these, taking care of material needs is particularly important.

5. On the other site I asked why is it that zero people are suggesting that to win the climate fight nations should use rationing like the US & UK did in WWII?

   Why are people settling for the indirect effects of gov. actions, instead of direct gov. action to get people to do what needs to be done. Whatever that is.

   The nation needs people to burn less gas and oil, ration it.
   The nation needs people to plant trees in burned over square miles of forest or brush. hire them to do that and pay them. Hire helpers, including people to stand there with a large sun shade. It isn’t necessary to be efficient, until we run out of unemployed people.
   The nation needs people to eat less beef, ration beef.

   With modern debit cards it would be simple to make the ration system work. Give *every* person over 12 years old a ration card to use.

   Why not ration things, instead of raising their price? We could let the very rich buy a 2nd card and the super rich buy 2 more cards. These would be expensive, though.

   IMHO, the world is in a “state of siege”. Back in the day, the gov. took control of all the food and rationed it, and provided shelter or all inside the walls. This is the model to follow in this crisis.

6. “There is now definite evidence that further fiscal support is required and the silence from the Federal government reveals their disdain for the plight of the workers.”

   Certainly I agree with this, but in my opinion we need to consider, on a less granular level, the overarching problem that is likely to see us in fairly dire straits in every respect for the next 18 months at the very least.

   Basically, with an “all-in on vaccines” policy, the Australian governments are implementing by stealth a sort of Great Barrington-Lite (you’ll remember that the Great Barrington Declaration was the assertion by various ghouls last year, before a vaccine was on the horizon, that we have to stay open at all costs, public health consequences be damned).

   It’s a truism to point out that lockdowns have a real cost, as does Covid itself. It’s important to remember, though, that Melbourne’s 2020 lockdown was a success, insofar as it lead to the elimination of Covid in this country. The state government was to blame for it getting to that point in the first place, but they did what was necessary and, once the lockdown was implemented, they did it well. It has, however, been forgotten, that it is not the lockdown alone that caused case numbers to decline in Melbourne last year. It was only the introduction of the mask mandate (Australia – and the west in general – was abjectly late to masking). See this paper for more: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0253510

   That mask policy was good enough for Covid in 2020 when the “natural” R0 was only about 2. It took several months but Melbourne (where I live) got back to normal, relatively speaking, and enjoyed a relatively blissful period of normalcy from October to June, due to our having eliminated Covid.

   Fast forward to June this year (and setting aside Berejiklian’s grotesque misleadership specifically for a second) and the lockdowns and mask mandates we have now are bound to leave us treading water, instead of eliminating the virus or even just reducing the R0 in a helpful way. The latter is still possible. There is nothing mechanically about the delta variant that means in principle that masks that worked against last year no longer work this year. The difference is that the virus is more transmissible, in part because of its higher “natural” viral load (which means the R0 is closer to 8, I think, instead of 2).

   We have failed to adapt our masking advice to the new variant of delta. Masks “work” but it’s not a dichotomy of “yes they work”/”no they don’t work” – it’s about reducing the probability of infection, and this is going to vary dramatically based primarily on the fit and material of the mask. Generic surgical masks may have been enough last year, but now it’s not enough.

   Instead of looking at a Covid reduction strategy that is empircally known to work on first principles and looking at how we can improve it, we have completely neglected it in favour of relying on vaccines and the ridiculous Doherty Institute modelling (modelling so shabby that any mainstream macroeconomist would be proud to call it their own – accordingly, politicians cling to the mythical 70 and 80% numbers with dogmatic fervour) and have more or less advised “yep, keep wearing masks, but they’re not enough to stop delta spreading”. It’s tendentious nonsense.

   The fact is, masking in Melbourne (and I presume NSW) is woefully inadequate for fighting delta. Loosely fitted, ‘leaky’ surgical masks are the norm, and many people wear them under their nostrils or, worse, lower them when they’re speaking. Cloth masks are probably better than poorly fit surgicals but they vary wildly in fit and quality, as they are not standardised. Good enough for last year’s variant, less helpful for delta. People wear masks outdoors in crowded areas (often where people are exercising and breathing heavily) when we know the risk of outdoor transmission is greater now. The best masks right now for the general public are those that meet the ‘KN95/N95/P2’ standard, and they are rarely seen. These masks will protect the individual wearing them, and those they share an indoor space with. I personally “double mask” – wear a looser cloth mask over a fitted surgical or KN95 mask (not all KN95s are rigid and inflexible, and for non-health workers, they can be re-used), there’s not a huge body of research on this yet but the technique appears to be promising in terms of conferring extra protection (and makes sense purely as a common-sense hypothesis). I don’t want to bombard the blog with links to mask evidence so I hope readers will take this information in good faith.

   It’s one thing to get people to co-operate with a mask mandate in the first place, another to say “okay, but now you have to a wear a certain kind of mask, a certain kind of way”. But actually, the solution is pretty obvious: Have the Federal Gov’t supply KN95 or equivalent masks to every resident of the country, on an ongoing basis if necessary, along with an info card/fridge magnet explaining best masking practices and what we would stand to gain from following them. You don’t even need to be an MMTer to understand that this is obviously possible: the federal government is doing similar right now with vaccines. Seriously, it is embarrassing how out of date our mask advice is – even the US CDC’s advice is better, more up-to-date than ours! Try telling me that this won’t – at the very least – meaningfully reduce the R0 in Australia, which is what we should be doing particularly as NSW’s health system is overwhelmed, with Victoria’s presumably to follow.

   We don’t know what the ‘endgame’ for this virus is. Many people breezily assume that in one or two years time it will evolve into something completely benign and will be just like the common cold. Pure hubris. We don’t know what’s going to happen – although I daresay a variant even more transmissible than Delta is almost a certainty at some point, meaning that control of transmission is only ever going to get harder. We can make educated guesses, but that is what they are. Consider how much consensus experts have got wrong about this virus since the beginning; do we really want to be planning for the future based on their Panglossian prognostications? How’s that worked out for the world so far?

   I have to point out that I’m not anti-vax – I had my first shot on Tuesday – but the vaccines have been oversold as the “road out of the pandemic” when they’re nothing of the sort. Moreover, this has been known since last year. It was known after the new vaccines’ trials that they did not stop infection or transmission (they were never designed to). An Australian immunologist Robert Clancy wrote in Quadrant (I know, I know) early this year a predictive outline of the limitations of the vaccines, which has pretty much exactly come to pass. The “Pandemic of the unvaccinated” rhetoric is not only arrant nonsense, it’s pernicious social Darwinist dreck. The UK, 80% vaccinated, has been wavering between 100-200 daily deaths from Covid for the last month. That’s some definition of “living with the pandemic”.

   There’s no doubt the vaccines were very important to deploy in the rest of the world where cases were raging out of control and things were very bleak indeed (that countries seem to have failed to plan much farther beyond this vaccination campaign is an issue for another day). But the situation in Australia was completely different. In this respect, criticising Morrison for the vaccine supply cock-up is a bit of a red herring. In fact, up until June I had been viewing it as a blessing in disguise – we would have plenty of time to view what the vaccines were doing in the rest of the world, how they coped with delta, how long they offered strong protection, and then plan accordingly. This would have been a perfectly scientific thing to do, nevermind straightforwardly prudent. But then delta came to Sydney and, well, like I said: Great Barrington-lite. 70%! 80%! Back To Normal!

   (I see that Bill has already linked in the past to the Institut Economique Molinari’s paper on the superior health, economic, and civil liberty outcomes for those jurisdictions that pursue a zero covid policy – readers can search for the relevant terms to read more on this)

   And notice how quickly the rhetoric changed. “it’s inevitable, we all have to get infected eventually”. “We can’t stop the virus, we’re going to have to live with it, just like the flu” (have you checked the flu stats in Aus and NZ lately?) “masks can’t beat delta”. These were not arguments, they were handwaves, assertions completely unsupported by any convincing evidence. These have come to be almost completely accepted by the public without question, and besides, the miracle vaccines are here to save the day and get us back to normal. Oh, and Long Covid, of course, is never mentioned by these charlatans.

   Unfortunately, my parents who will both be double vaccinated are nevertheless going to be at ongoing high risk if the virus is left to run rampant, and consequently I will be leaving my life in melbourne early next year to be closer to them. The irony of this is, I could well be the one that ends up transmitting the virus to them, in spite of all my precautions. Oh, but obviously, the one and only risk to mental health in this country is lockdowns, not the capricious cruelty of a dangerous virus allowed to spread uncontrolled throughout the population (as an aside: this is a dangerous game of political cynicism to be playing. Maybe we could ask what the mental health consequences of abandoning the full employment white paper have been over the past 50 years, hm? Who foots the bill for that one?)

   I’m at my wit’s end about it to be honest. What is happening here is so unnecessary, and so avoidable. It is absolutely gutless behaviour by Berejiklian, Morrison and, ultimately, Andrews as well. The Lucky Country’s luck is about to run out.

7. I’m sorry Bill, I need to get my 2 cents in about covid and the future.
   1] Smallpox didn’t not mutate ti become less lethal in Europe over the centuries.
   We know this because smallpox killed millions of natives in the New World in the 1500s and 1600s.
   So, why were fewer and fewer Europeans dying of smallpox as time went on?
   It is clearly obvious that it was because the surviving people had the kids that were more likely to survive, and over 1000 years, every European had some built in immunity to it. So, fewer and fewer died from it.
   So, yes, covid could evolve quickly to be less lethal, but the chance this will happen in unknown, given our current state of science. Or humans could over centuries evolve to be somewhat immune to it.
   2] I also double mask when I’m out in building with people. I single mask when I’m driving and sitting in the car waiting as the wife shops.
   3] The vaccines do not give 100% protection from covid, and they seem to need booster shots. Living with covid may require a booster to *every* person on earth every 1 or 2 years. Worse, people can be sick, spreading it, and not know.
   . . These 2 facts (if true) mean that to live with covid we will need both masks and vaccines.
   4] We need better vaccines before we can live the same normal lives as we did before it came along. This may not be possible.
   5] Therefore, we may need to find a way to live a new way of normal, if it becomes necessary. Time will tell us. However, as of now we don’t know the future.

   I’m not making recommendations here, except to get vaccinated and double mask when around people. I’m just sharing my opinion of some facts.

   OTOH, we need people working in factories making stuff to fight covid and to fight ACC.

8. I basically agree with Basil Pesto and Steve_American above. The general public are being sold a lot of over-simplistic nonsense about COVID-19, vaccines and opening up. This is the standard neoliberal script. Business incomes are sacrosanct. Worker, pensioner, minority, ill/disabled peoples’ lives and even the lives of people with immune / inflammatory and/or neurological systems rather different from the norm are all expendable lives according to neoliberalism.

   Vaccines work well for sure. But they are not perfect and significant problems are emerging with immune escape, vaccine escape and vaccine leak.

   Masks can work well but it’s not binary, it’s probabilistic. Just like vaccines they improve our chances most if applied correctly. For masks this means worn correctly, preferably doubled up or of high virion trapping quality. Also, work best if just about everybody wears them.

   Finally, self-imposed isolation works. The less you go out, the less danger you will face. Of course, isolation has to be balanced with requirements to earn income, interact and even care for other people and also to care for your own mental health.

   The idea whatever your situation is to use your advantages, whatever they are, to buffer against your vulnerabilities. The (relatively) ideal situation, if you can engineer it is;

   (a) Get double vaxxed and boostered as appropriate.
   (b) Wear double masks in public.
   (c) Socially distance as much as possible.
   (d) Get home deliveries instead of physical shopping.
   (e) Live in detached housing: the bigger the block of land the better.
   (f) Reduce social circles to similarly careful people.
   (g) Plan trips and holidays (when these become possible) for the period after vaccination when your protection is highest and before it would wane significantly. Practice distancing even on holidays.
   (h) Never, never set foot on a cruise ship for the first time or ever again. SERIOUSLY!

   Do as many of these as you can. I would avoid all indoor venues too but then I may be more paranoid than most… or I may know more than most.

9. ‘Progressives’ have become blind to fascism.

10. My God Bill you’ve got some right nutters commenting here.

11. @ Bill Marsh perhaps you can illuminate us regarding why some of the commenters are nutters?

12. Clearly, the *fact* that as vaccination numbers go up as we sloooowly open up and infections, hospitalizations and deaths go down, as well as the increase in discrepancy between vaccinated and vaccinated groups, means we are, and always were, nuts to think we could save lives!
    (And by “we”, I mean Portugal; let me by proud of my country, for once, for leading vaccination rates, even though it’s just as random of an event as anything else.)
    Seriously, though, they clearly work pretty well at helping to fight it when you inevitably catch it, they clearly work at reducing hospital load and mortality, and it’s likely post-vaccination infection will give you the same super-protection post-infection vaccination does as your body keeps adapting. Anything about general boosters, potential variants, herd immunity,… is just irrelevant noise at this point. (outside of those whose job is to study it). And probably profit margin increases.
    Although it probably is still dreadful if you have a weak immune system. Hang in there. And, well, most of the world we still keep vaccines from.