Thread: A Brave New World! Or will it be?

Back in February I told my 14yo grand daughter to keep a diary of this epidemic, because it is going to have a major impact on her life, and it will still be discussed decades into the future. And what she experiences will be worth putting into that discussion to help understand the world into which the following generation is coming.

I do not think we will be back to "life as normal" after this. There are going to be very significant changes in peoples attitudes to debt, to preparing for emergencies, and to what governments priorities should be. This will obviously mean lower levels of consumption, particularly discretionary spending, which will lead into significant, possibly massive changes in the 'service industries'.

As a country, and especially many communities, we will have realised that relying on tourism is something that can disappear overnight. Businesses of all kinds will have realised that relying on 'just in time' supply chains carries severe risks, and single source for key goods is a bad move.

These changes in attitudes are going to mean massive changes to the economy, and probably result in a lot more government intervention in the economy.

Businesses will have realised that working from home is not only practical, but an improvement in many cases, which has all sorts of implications. Teleconferencing works to replace many face to face business meetings - bye bye perhaps 30-50% of business flights. Think what this means for airlines.

And I suspect that people are going to be a lot more wary about stepping onto cruise ships in the future - if there are any still in business!

(Talking of cruise ships, my brother passed on today a gem reported from the Caribbean - a cruise ship was travelling very slowly just outside Venezuelan territorial waters, obviously in no hurry to get somewhere that charged port fees. It was accosted by a Venezuelan destroyer, which ordered it into port. The cruise ship ignored this, and also ignored a warning shot fired across its bows. The destroyer then attempted to push the ship's bow round towards port, but the far larger ship maintained course, presumably using their bow thruster to resist the forced turn. The destroyer, dragged sideways, capsized and sank. No word on whether they picked up survivors.)

Well, the next time some jingoist or tabloid journalist starts carrying on about how Australians are the best people in the world and mateship is our special ingredient we'll know that's not the case - punch ups over toilet paper, hoarding, gloating about getting in first, abuse of chemists, abuse of supermarket workers, abuse of Bunnings staff, thefts of masks and other PPE from hospitals, breaches of sensible restrictions to limit the spread, traffic jams outside brothels during stage 3 restrictions, scores of people breaching quarantine just because it suits them to do so ..... do I need to go on?

As GreyGhost says, you'd think that this pandemic would lead to an era of appreciation for simple things like being able to take a holiday and the value of community but, like AK83, my feeling is that most Australians have gone so far down the path of materialism and selfishness and borrowing to buy status symbols that when this is all over they'll just pick up where they left off. In fact, given the numbers who went down the South coast last weekend, there just seems to be a fundamental inability to act in a way that's appropriate or pays any attention to anything other than their own selfish needs. As Morrison said, who the hell were the 16,000 who went overseas after the restrictions started?

I had coffee with a friend from school a couple of weeks ago before the restrictions started. She and her husband are both very successful in their chosen fields and have made a lot of money, enough to be able to retire in their 50s if they wanted to. They live in a nice suburb but as she said given their combined income they could've afforded a much flasher house - and she said that they were continually being asked why they hadn't spent the maximum that they could. We get a similar attitude because we chose to buy a modest house within our means in a daggy neighbourhood rather than spend the maximum of what the banks would lend us in a more prestigious suburb. Ditto for a lot of our friends - modest houses and second-hand cars. But that's not the Australian way these days, most of the population wants flash cars and houses and they've borrowed to the hilt to do it. And then have the gall to look down on anyone who hasn't gone into hock to obtain status symbols.