The danger in the post-lockdown era is that in our rush to move on we forget the hard lessons that have been learned about this catastrophic public policy failure.
On the basis of alarmist modelling, often commissioned by governments and amplified by sensationalist media, panicked politicians discarded all basic ideas about proportionality and the rule of law to criminalise everyday life and exert unprecedented controls over the citizenry.
From the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, all Australian governments adopted the attitude that any public health mitigation measure was on the table, and little to no consideration was given to the costs of the measures that were adopted.
This is the subject of new research published by the Institute of Public Affairs, which for the first time in Australia calculates many of the costs of the nation’s Covid zealotry up to June 2022. In the report, Hard Lessons: Reckoning the Humanitarian, Economic, and Social Costs of Zero-Covid, we find that the total economic and fiscal cost of the Australian COVID-19 response was no less than A$938.4 billion (£550.6 billion) to June 2022. This report identifies:
- $595.8 billion in state and federal Government to enforce Covid policies and stimulate the economy;
- $259.8 billion in lost economic activity because of the restrictions and economic shutdowns;
- $82.8 billion in inflation related costs due to expansive monetary and fiscal policies, a cost which is set to only increase more and more over the next couple of years.
The research also calculates how much children suffered in terms of schooling. Despite being the safest cohort in society when it comes to COVID-19, children were routinely sent home to learn remotely or not learn at all. We estimate children in the state of Victoria would have lost about 12 weeks of reading skills and 17 weeks of numeracy skills, something which for many will never be recovered.
Even on the most basic metric, lockdowns failed. In terms of the number of years of life, the costs of joblessness because of the initial nationwide lockdowns in March and April 2020 were about 31 times more costly than the maximum possible years of life saved by lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021.
Even in the state of Victoria, whose Labor Government enthusiastically established a world-renowned Covid police state, politicians are no longer touting their pandemic response in the lead up to the state election in November.
Likewise, the former federal Liberal/Nationals Coalition Government, which was voted out of office earlier this year, rarely boasted of its Covid response.
Governments of the Covid era appear to have accepted the failure of the Covid-elimination approach, but rather than confront the reality of this failure are just pretending that it never happened.
This is not about living in the past, because the reality is we are still bearing the costs now. In terms of the resulting mental health crisis, lost learning, shuttered businesses, Government debt and inflation, we are not likely to know the full costs of the Covid response for many years to come.
Our future wellbeing as a society also demands that we remember the hard lessons of the Covid response.
We will need to deal with pandemics in the future, and it is critical to know what went wrong, and how these failures came to be.
Australians were subject to the harshest restrictions on their way of life in their history, and we should be demanding not that it should be forgotten, but that it should be remembered so that it doesn’t happen again.
Morgan Begg is the Director of the Legal Rights Program at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia.
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Imagine if they had done this for real!
What larks!
“We will need to deal with pandemics in the future…”
Why?
The last true pandemic was in the 17th century. Are they now turning up like delayed British Rail trains one after the other? Absolute cobblers.
An utterly inconsequential and limp-wristed comment on how Australia managed to waste so much money through the C1984.
The point about allegedly spending so much money was in order to generate debt that could never be met. The intention is to crash Western if not worldwide financial systems, a point that appears to have sailed over the author’s head.
Just remembering and forgiving is a non-starter.
As long as people don’t have to go to jail or worse, that simply won’t work.
The new net zero policy will cost Australia much much more. The only benefits will be virtue signalling by the politicians to politicians and MSM elsewhere.
It annoys me to read this sort of statement. Why must there be more pandemics in the future? We had 100 years without a “pandemic”.
Bill Gates is the only person who I’ve ever heard bang on about pandemics prior to 2020 and he kept warning everyone for 10+ years that one was coming.
He is the biggest funder of the WHO who in 2019 changed the definition of a pandemic from something that caused many deaths to something that caused many infections.
And only by that new definition can this covid crap be called a pandemic. Because even by their highly inflated death numbers it doesn’t register even as a blip in global mortality.
Stop calling covid a pandemic. Stop parroting the nonsense that we are certain to have more in the future. Otherwise, we’re just playing Bill Gates’ sick, monstrous game.
Very well put.
Well I cannot say enough good things about this film and here seems as good a place as any to share it. A Spanish film maker made a documentary, featuring a plethora of experts from a variety of backgrounds, about the whole scamdemic and what it appears the objective of it all is. It features much coverage of the gene therapies and if you don’t know about it already, wait until you hear about the ‘MAC Address’. This leads nicely to my pet project at the moment, the contents of the pseudo-vaccines. Dr Campra is interviewed, who did extensive microscopic examination of the vials and he has identified graphene and experts in nano-technology agree that there looks to be evidence of nano-tech within the products. This would tie in with with Media Access Control ( MAC ) and it looks like more ominous proof of what the game-plan is with these mRNA injections. “Transhumanism by force”…it’s starting to seem not so far-fetched any more.
It’s 2hrs 15mins so I watched it in segments. Enjoy and share!
https://odysee.com/@thebigreset:1/ENGLISH:bb
As others have said, I’m not keen on the statement that we will need to deal with pandemics in future. I think it’s much safer for everyone to assume that there won’t be any more pandemics and if there are there will be little we can do about them. The risk of not being prepared for a largely unforeseeable event seems much lower than the risk of Public Health Fascists seeing “pandemics” everywhere and thinking we can “deal with them”.
Other than that, good article and thanks for the info.
The reason we don’t have to concern ourselves about future pandemics is that there won’t be any. Health systems around the world are sufficiently robust enough to provide early signalling as per the Ebola outbreak of what, twenty years ago? And even the Ebola outbreak has questions.
Any future so-called “pandemic” is 100% guaranteed to have been manufactured and from a lab. Unless it is deliberate we have no need to fear pandemics. Our real science base – as opposed to ‘The Science’ – is sufficiently advanced to be able to cope and any outbreak could be readily contained via current known measures of efficacy as opposed to the crap of health destroying NPI’s and lockdowns. We certainly will not require poisonous gunk propogandised as “vaccines” by way of control. To people of intelligence “vaccines” are a criminal assault on humanity.
So “pandemics” are part of an evil history but must never be forgotten.
Never Forget. Never Forgive.
A ‘casedemic’ is all it ever was because, as we clued-up folks know, without the dodgey and fraudulent PCR tests, with its way too high amplifications applied to samples, the mass testing, especially of perfectly well, symptom-free people, this would have been indistinguishable from another flu. Certainly no worse in severity anyways. They needed the so-called ”cases” to support the propaganda in ramping up the fear factor. As Dr Wodarg says, no PCR tests=no pandemic. But these bloody things were an integral driver of the entire scam, and just like we never ever had lockdowns, masks or distancing during previous outbreaks of respiratory disease, we also never had mass testing. But 2020 was the year science died because none of these interventions have supporting evidence to underpin the efficacy or use on a global scale. But that doesn’t seem to matter when there’s a wider agenda being insidiously implemented.
Thanks Mogs.
Others have already written it here, and I’ve written it on DS/LS countless times – SARS-COV-2 WAS NOT A PANDEMIC.
SO PLEASE – stop calling it one. Call it what you like, I can think of many names for the events of the last 2.5 years, but a pandemic it was not!
And this isn’t hindsight – it was evident from before Lockdown that it was merely a bad seasonal flu, and certainly not the worst we have seen.
Let’s stay sane – and yes, let’s learn the lessons of what happens when science becomes politicised, when adults are infantilised, when debate is stifled by powerful forces with vested interests, when the politicians we elect display zero ability for critical thinking, and so on.
Can you imagine how disastrous the swine flu scamdemic would have ended up if they’d had PCR tests back then? We’d be old hands at lockdowns and the like by now.
Don’t forget how Dr Wolfgang Wodarg went to town and did battle with the WHO back in 2010 because he saw exactly what was going on with regards to the WHO downgrading their criteria for what can be declared a pandemic. So the swine flu had a fraction of the seasonal flu deaths but due to this manipulation of the definition it was declared a pandemic. It was a proper hoax though, now we know. And why did they do that? Why vaccines and profit of course. So this is history repeating itself, just with some more sinister and sci-fi type twists! The details are covered here;
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-eu-investigated-who-for-fake-pandemic/
I’m sorry, Mr Begg, but we’re very long passed the point that we can afford to pardon the Global Revolutionaries with the excuse that they tried policies that failed. This is as good as letting them off the hook – and we don’t learn anything because we didn’t have the guts to acknowledge that every destructive policy inflicted on us over the last three years was intended to be destructive.
The starting point is acknowledging that there has NOT been a pandemic within the last three years. We have been assaulted by the biggest psychological operation in human history. We have been bullied and coerced into being injected with experimental gene therapy that is known to contain nano dust.
When we accept this, we realise they have not ‘failed’ at anything, and we have merely moved on to another phase of Agenda 2030.
Thanks for reminding readers of this.
I’m a little surprised at the harshness of the comments.
I have been a member of the IPA for a number of years. They do important work on a number of issues- predominantly the climate scam and the threat to Western Civilization in schools/ universities, etc.
While I agree with comments on the use of the word “pandemic”, no one else in Australia has performed a forensic analysis of the costs of our appalling Covid policies, and for this they deserve credit.
The IPA findings generally have a degree of penetration in the MSM, so the occasional sheeple may actually be confronted with the truth.
Let me be blunt – the author is taking the story put out by MSM, at the behest of government, acting on behalf of the RPTB, at face value. The failure to grasp the true underlying narrative (hate that word) is why some of us are so peed off with the article. It is almost infantile in its grasp of the real story.
“It’s not always about what they say it’s about.”
I fully concur, though feel any exposure of the victims of mass formation/psychosis to the reality of the past 2 1/2 is a positive.
It is also important to note the IPA has largely stuck to its areas of strength – climate scam and threats to Western Civilization – as it does not employ medical researchers. Hence the focus on non-medical consequences.