Back in March, there was a vast level of uncertainty over what would happen and how things might unfold. And then there was THE BIG LIE of the time about the need “to flatten the curve” which was a justification whose relevance did not last the month. Yet here we are, more than six months later, where we can see that the economies that did the least – Sweden say, and Taiwan – are the ones who are going forward, while those who have taken the hardest road are facing both economic and social disaster. The question is why is this continuing?

NO MEDICAL DANGER You may get Covid but unless you are old and have these “co-morbidities” you are not going to die from it. You have to be colossally ignorant by now not to know the chances of dying from Covid-19 is for all practical purposes zero. There have been 770 deaths in Australia with Covid present which in itself is a death rate from the virus of 0.003%, that is 3 persons per 100,000 in the population. We are dealing with a form of morbid ignorance and stupidity which no government should ever cater to.

DESTROYING THE ECONOMY And it is only the private sector that has been affected. Every useless public servant has continued to be employed on full salary, along with even the occasionally useful one. Everyone has now been reduced to a relatively primitive standard of living. You get to stay in your own house and you can find food in the shops. Thousands of businesses have been ruined which will never come back. Well paying jobs are disappearing. And even those self-satisfied public servants will be in for a shock when governments at every level eventually find they cannot pay what they used to pay because of the enormous debts governments now have. The future levels of taxation will be quite a horror story for quite a few amongst us.

DESTROYING OUR SOCIAL LIVES Even among those who who have others to live with – wives, husbands, partners, children – have had their personal lives devastated. Social contacts have been diminished. Our usual ways of getting on and about – going to each other’s homes, going to the theatre, meeting up for lunch, travel – have been utterly smashed. For those on their own, the isolation has been awful. An almost total contraction of being with others. The lie that “we are all in this together” really is that you are left all on your own and by yourselves to do as best you can.

UNDERMINING OUR FUTURE Lives, alas, are finite. By government decree, each of us has lost a year of our lives in which we would have done many other things had we not been stopped from doing them. The economy will not, of course, come back as it was, and many job opportunities will be lost. Some may never work again, with retirement incomes never reaching the potential they might have achieved. There are trips we didn’t take, visits we never made, studies we never took up, and much much more. Each day has been much less of what in normal times it might have been.

LOSS OF PERSONAL FREEDOM Not only have we lost our personal freedom we have lost our trust in political institutions. We have exposed just how shallow and generally ignorant our political leaders are. They stand for nothing other than their own will to rule. Whatever the polls of the moment may show, has any political leader in charge of a lockdown grown in political stature? Not a single one. Every one of them will be remembered as part of a pack of political fools. There is the Melbourne Syndrome, in which a population in fear grows grateful to their captors, but that will evaporate soon enough, following which will come the anger and resentment for having been deceived by people who will be recognised as having been overwhelmed by events and with no particularly ability to lead. Yet we have seen how easy it is for a government to generate a sense of crisis in which the single most significant aspect of our lives – our ability to live our own lives in our own way – has been ripped from us on false pretences.

LOSS OF TRUST IN THE MEDIA The media have again been exposed as a gaggle of ignorant nobodies with the collective knowledge and depth of the nation’s Grade 4 teachers, if even that. The endless inability to set out any issue in a way that balances all of the relevant considerations has been striking. Merely in relation to the debate over Hydroxychloroquine, the media have joined with the governing classes to spread concern about a drug that would without question have taken the spectre of death completely out of the political equation, never mind having been able to save many lives.

There will eventually have to be a reckoning. How did we let this happen and how can we make sure it never happens again? This non-crisis will eventually come to an end, although having original thought this could not last past June, I am no longer willing to guess just how crazed and power-hungry our political class is or how cowardly the population at large is or how easily they are able to be thrown into a terrified frenzy. But we have learned a lesson, or at least I hope we have. Ultimately this episode should weigh heavily on our political direction. People will be elected with the promise to remedy the obvious deficiencies in our political arrangements.