Moving Beyond Lockdowns

Covid 2021 

A few days ago I penned a few thoughts on Australia's current Covid challenge:

I think Australia must get to the point where we accept a tolerable level of deaths per year, say 1000 or so. This is in the influenza and road deaths region. At the current death rate of 0.3% of Delta cases, that means we should aim to limit daily cases to approximately 1000 across the country (365,000 per year). We’re around 1300 today.

We may even be forced to accept a sadder scenario - around 2000 deaths per year and 2000 cases per day. Given that 50,000 Australians die every year from various cancers, we may well have to embrace these numbers in order to fully open the economy and our state and international borders.

The problem is stopping rapid outbreaks. People will accept stable numbers but not rapidly increasing ones. That scares them. Our expectation is that aggressive vaccination rates will be the pathway to this stability. The evidence from around the world is that 70-80% of the adult population will be nowhere near enough. We will need to get to 90% of the total population and that will mean child doses for kids aged from three to 12. Over time the daily cases will inevitably decline.

Unfortunately we lack political leadership. We need our Federal and State governments to clearly articulate these realities, and persuade people that these ambitions are not harsh or cruel, but realistic and manageable. We have no other choice. The Delta variant is extremely infectious, and current elimination strategies involving constant lockdowns are incredibly harmful and unrealistic. Getting back to ‘normal’ means accepting the new Delta normal. Last year’s Wuhan variant is long gone. Like in the Cold War our strategy must be one of containment, not suppression. 

The real issue governments need to address involves ensuring the national health infrastructure is able to cope with these Delta realities. Hospitals will need an increased number of well staffed ICU and ventilation facilities, ambulance services will need to be expanded, and fit-for-purpose quarantine facilities built as a matter of urgency. This substantial level of increased investment in the health system needs to be federally funded. It is a national emergency.

The ‘zero case’ ambitions of the smaller states can’t be allowed to continue. They are a Wuhan leftover. All states and territories must embrace today’s challenge. Border closures are unAustralian, unfair and unrealistic given leakages will always happen. Our international border closures must also end.

Vaccine passports must be made mandatory for access to all events, retail, educational, care, travel and hospitality services. Enforcement will likely be a problem however, particularly for small businesses. It will be expensive and could become ugly. Once again the federal government must step in and fund these necessary security measures. 

 

Robert Gott, The Orchard Murders

 

- This is the first novel from Australian crime writer Robert Gott I've read. It's the fourth novel in his acclaimed Murders series, set in Melbourne during the second world war. 

- I enjoyed it immensely. It's obvious Gott has a talent for creating very interesting characters and absorbing storylines. Perhaps because this one was the fourth in the series the principal characters' backstories, while summarily fleshed out, invest the plot with a lot of detail that takes a while to stick in your memory. Nevertheless it does and the characters become fully alive and immensely attractive. Their personal relationships as friends and family are a key feature. And it was a delight to read a novel set in Melbourne's suburbs and streets in 1943, at the height of the Japanese invasion threat.

- Usually crime novels or TV series featuring Private Detectives are about as cliched as you can get - alcoholic, divorced, untidy habits, dingy offices, lowlife associates, etc. But Gott takes an entirely opposite approach and it's refreshing.  

- If the novel has a problem it's that it gets a bit cloying and cheesy at times. It’s got a touch of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five about it. Though the murders and violence are pretty ugly, the young friends and family members are all so nice to each other, and always inviting each other for dinner. (There's no sex though!). The senior police detective, who informally works with them, is their father figure, and he's also so nice. 

- Another problem is that some ancillary but interesting storylines sort of fizzle out at the end. The characters we've become interested in are abandoned.

- During Melbourne's stage 7, 8 and 9 lockdowns I'll read the previous three novels in the series though, for sure. 

(The three previous novels are The Holiday Murders, The Port Fairy Murders, and The Autumn Murders)

Emma Shortis, Our Exceptional Friend

 

- This new book by Australian historian Emma Shortis is just so good I literally squealed with delight at virtually every para. Try this:

The relationship remains based on those shared assumptions about the world - that it is full of threats to be countered, that those threats can only be mitigated by shows of strength, that American power is infinitely preferable to any other kind, that the violence that comes with it is inevitable, that Australia is just a bit player in the global scheme of things and can only carry on as it has.

This is bullshit.

- Shortis critiques our relationship with the US on every level. Her chapters list them all - shared values, shared enemies, shared wars, shared bombs, shared money, shared climate, shared fears, shared supremacy, and shared cosmos (space exploration). Her conclusion asks us to radically reassess a possible shared future.

- Her particular focus is the ANZUS Treaty, its origins and dismal legacy. The chapter on shared wars is powerful. Korea, Vietnam, Afganistan, Iraq - Shortis condemns the racism ('yellow peril') and total lack of morality. Australia's constant genuflecting to American dominance has always shown our embarrassing feebleness and lack of character.   

The degree to which the American military industrial complex has captured Australia is almost unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Since the Korean War in the 1950s, Australia has been one of the few countries to blindly trail America into each conflict. Our government's collective refusal to reckon with this legacy - to really confront the morality of American wars and our enthusiastic participation in them - has helped perpetuate American imperialism and led to the unnecessary, violent deaths of millions of people.

- What frightens me, and unfortunately Shortis doesn't address this specifically, is a possible US-China military confrontation over Taiwan. How will Australia respond? In the usual way? 

- This book is a must read.  

Katherine Brabon, The Shut Ins.

 

- This magnificent novel from Katherine Brabon is best read slowly, absorbing the detail and atmospherics in every sublime sentence. Brabon knows how to represent the ‘deep down inside’ of people. Her recent trip to Japan made her aware of the well known condition of Achiragawa, the 'other side'.

- She tells the stories of four Japanese people, connected to each other in family and other ways - Mai, Sadako, Hiromi and Hikaru. Mai and Hikaru were friends at school, Sadako is a bar hostess who 'entertains' Mai's husband 'J', and Hiromi is Hikaru's mother. The setting is Japan in the spring and summer of 2014. 

- J, never fully named, is comfortable with being part of the systems that make the world run smoothly. He’s a salaryman, a corporate loyalist, a man who decries ‘individual deficiencies’. He's barely human in other words. Mai and J are unhappy in marriage. Hikaru, on the other hand, began to truly leave this world and inhabit somewhere else. It was a form of 'social suicide', a peculiar Japanese condition labelled Hikikomori.

- Brabon's expository reflections on Japan and feelings of solitude and loneliness struck me very personally. I lived and worked in Tokyo for two years in the early 80's, managing a company with 35 employees, all Japanese. Not only does she perfectly capture the experiences of many gaijin (foreigners), but she brings alive so much of the anguish, pressure and stress of navigating this rigid society, the deadening social and cultural expectations, the imprisoning traditions, and most importantly, the deep misogyny of Japanese society. (Westerners constantly remark on the ‘politeness’ of the Japanese. It’s not politeness as we know it, but simply a social ritual, a distancing from any sort of personal engagement, and quite meaningless. We're in a world of transactional relationships). 

- Mai's story perfectly conveys the boring, standardised social lives of ordinary Japanese people - little individuality and total conformity. There is a comfort in everything unfolding as it should.

- The bar hostess Sadako's body was struggling to cope, as if rotting inside...I’m no good, she told herself. The roles she plays, and the pretence. Inside her there was a cold stone, perhaps impossible to remove.

- The young man Hikaru suffers from the condition severely: …I could avoid mistakes and consequences if I just stayed on this side of the door. He had a fear towards anybody who worked, anybody who was part of the systems everybody lived by. The people in charge said we had been raised in a society that made us focus on sacrificing individual preferences for a collective goal, and this made us struggle to express individual desires. Shutting ourselves away was the only way we knew how to do this. 

- Brabon reflects at the end: If anything, the story may help us to live with the loneliness and restlessness that visit like shifting cloud shadows - that is, the natural condition of this side.

- I can't recommend this superb novel highly enough. It's a major achievement.

J.P. Pomare, The Last Guests

 

- If there's one message from this book it's 'don’t cheat on your husband'.

- I was disappointed in it. It's a rather ordinary psychological thriller about a couple, their backstories, and the tense relationship that develops because of their secrets. 

- At the heart of the story is an act by the wife that totally lacks credibility. 

- The resolution at the end is stagey, melodramatic and all tricks and mirrors. Emotionally it's far from satisfactory.

- Pomare's previous novels are far better, particularly In the Clearing.

 

Tim Dean, How We Became Human

 

- This is a very enlightening and fascinating book. Dean's ability to bring anthropological, sociological, psychological, historical, cultural, as well as philosophical insights to the age old drama of human morality and its development, and to do so in such lucid prose, is simply breathtaking. 

- (My first degree as a young man was in Catholic Theology from the Universita Urbiana in Rome in the late 1960's. I was studying for the priesthood. The Second Vatican Council had just finished and there were revolutions in every sphere - but one. Our professors were inspired by the reformist thinking upending every dimension of their particular fields - doctrinal, scriptural, liturgical, sacramental. Except for one. That was moral theology. It was stuck in medieval mud, and amazingly still is sixty years later. Not one dimension of the church's thinking and teaching on morality has changed. I live in hope that over the next few decades such a profound revolution will be unleashed)

- As Dean claims: One of the core themes of this book is that morality ought to adapt to the world we live in. His argument is wide-ranging with explorations of race, empathy, anger, ostracism, social media, outrage, cancel culture, mob incitement, sex, political divides, and other contemporary tensions.

- His chapter on religion is exceptionally good. Religious belief can be good and bad. From ancient times there were small gods that evolved into Big Gods. There is atheism, and our current secular democratic societies with their substantial social services have enabled inevitable religious decline. 

- The chapter on sex through the ages is insightful and comprehensive; today's fierce debates are sympathetically explored, such as biological determinism and the spectrum. He lashes Victorian Sexual Morality and provides a nice summary of contraception and the pill and how sexual lives have been liberated.            

- Political and social morality is a field rarely covered in any depth, particularly in Christian theology, but Dean does it superbly and sympathetically. What has brought about the swerve to the populist right in recent politics? Why did 2016 happen - Brexit and Trump? He explores ethnonationalism, and the sociological divide of 'Anywheres' and 'Somewheres'. 

- The final chapter on moral customs throughout history is well worth quoting:

 

Amanda Lohrey, The Labyrinth.

 

- Lohrey's narrator Erica Marsden has had an interesting life as a young woman and mother in inner Sydney but now comes across as quite alone, uninteresting and boring in middle age.

- She moves to an isolated coastal hamlet south of Sydney to be close to where her son Daniel is imprisoned for arson and murder, and interacts with the usual inhabitants, some friendly, some cold. Typically there are village idiots in the mix, one her neighbour Ray. But thankfully he emerges as a helpful blokey type at the end, assisting with the construction of her prized labyrinth. 

- Assorted stories of families and estrangement are the novel's central focus. Daniel is a painter yet mentally quite unstable. (Her visitations to him are rendered in italics for some peculiar reason). She hasn’t spoken to her brother Axel 'since he married a woman who judged me'. A neighbour's young daughter Lexie has a loving and supportive relationship with her brother Jesse by contrast. There are lots of other characters dotted throughout, most only tangentially. The stresses and strains of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, and siblings.

- Underpinning this rather ordinary and often tiresome narrative is Erica's obsession with labyrinths. She had a dream and is now its ‘captive’. We're constantly teased about the deeper meaning of it, but never convinced. Is it a rendition of her mother’s womb? An ancient entity with a mystical edge '...as if my body has been laid on the ground in another form…its pattern of sinuous pathways’?

- Normally individuals who are alienated from the mainstream go to the margins, and become thinkers and critics. Erica doesn’t think at all. She is also burning her son’s many books just because he asked her to. 

- In Part 2 of the book called The Labyrinth we meet Jurko the itinerant stonemason of Albanian heritage who is an illegal immigrant living in a tent near the town. Erica hires him to build the labyrinth. He is a fascinating character who thankfully invests the story with a bit of life. He hates religion and many so-called civilised things and is a delightfully straight talker. 

- So what is Lohrey on about here? Is it about outsiders, marginals, the lost, finding a way, a journey back? She likes the word 'banality': ‘the banality of the everyday’; ‘the banality of the reasonable’. 

- The touch is too light though, rendering the book, in my opinion, a lightweight. A huge list of quoted reviews in the preliminary pages of the book however are fulsome in their praise - 'compelling, visceral, deeply moving, haunting, luminous'...etc, etc, etc. I'm totally outnumbered. 

- The novel won this year's Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize. Which doesn't surprise me.
 

Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled.

 

- Steve Koonin is a highly regarded theoretical physicist and a leader in science policy in the US. He served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under Obama. His book, published in May this year, has caused a lot of controversy and debate. Climate Scientists, who zealously guard their patch, don't like it. Climate denialists do. 

- In my view it's a pity that he titled it Unsettled. His principal argument is not that the science is unsettled, it's that the science is constantly being poorly communicated and misrepresented. It's not just the media who are to blame. The summary documents and assessment reports from the IPCC and other bodies too frequently gloss over the fine print in the interest of infusing their key messages with a bit of popular appeal. And the fine print is never as dramatic, challenging or frightening. 

- Koonin's argument is you can’t be a scientist and an activist at the same time. Many climate scientists are ‘…overwilling to persuade rather than inform’.

- Is this naive? Is it sophisticated denialism? Or is it an informed critique of apocalyptic media messaging. In my view the latter. It's a very measured and sobering account of complex issues. He doesn't deny climate change is happening, and that human influence is a key contributor. What we get is a very clear presentation of the key issues: what is natural versus what is human caused. We should pay more attention to the science than what he labels ‘The Science’, an entity constructed mainly by the media. He labels his work as ‘accurate, frank, and accessible’. 

- The first few chapters cover the basics of the science. There's nothing new here, but his ability to write clear English definitely helps. The chapter on climate modelling is a little too technical for the average reader but it's definitely worth persevering with. Koonin wrote a classic textbook on statistical modelling in the 1980's. He's very enlightening on how it all works, how long it takes to do, its structural weaknesses, and how accurate it's likely to be in the end. 

- Then come the controversial chapters. Temperature increase: no significant trends over the last century. Hurricanes, twisters, floods, droughts and fires: modest changes with little significance. Rising sea levels: no evidence of human contribution being significant. Climate related deaths, agricultural disasters, enormous economic costs by the end of the century: ‘apocalypses that ain’t’.

- He quotes Leo Tolstoy:  The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

- He then addresses in Part Two of the book 'The Response'. Here his manifest scepticism is clear. He considers the Paris Agreement's goals of limiting warming to 2 degrees, or preferably 1.5, by 2050 totally unrealistic. As for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 that is 'highly unlikely'. Even by 2075. Even if the developed countries succeeded in their ambitions, the developing world’s economic growth makes it virtually impossible. He argues that ‘adapting’ is the only way to go. 

- As the book progressed the more disappointed in it I became. He’s a bit of a fossil fuel advocate (not openly but by inclination). He's conveniently pessimistic about renewables and their commercial potential. He barely mentions solar, or wind turbines, or government incentives. He's not keen on a carbon tax or government regulation. He's lazy in ambition, his complacency is evident, and there's always a distinct lack of urgency. Of course he settles for adaptation. It's far easier. It's almost as if he lives in another universe. '...the US accounts for only some 13% of global greenhouse gas', so why bother? 

- His final, totally uninspiring, thought is this: 

‘I believe the socio-technical obstacles to reducing CO2 emissions make it likely that human influences on the climate will not be stabilised, let alone reduced, in this century’. 

- So let's all live for today for tomorrow we die.