COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity virus.
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Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and economist, is blunt in his assessment. It's 6am our time Thursday, and courtesy of The Australia Institute he's talking to Wayne Swan, remarkably perky at that early hour, on inequality in a pandemic.
Stiglitz is not the first person to express that sentiment. Already we know that in the US, poor communities have been hit hardest. No access to health care, no opportunity to work from home. Poor pay or no sick pay. UNESCO estimates about 900 million learners have already suffered from school closures.
In Australia, the ACTU's research exposes exactly who will suffer most harm from the pandemic: casuals, those on lower incomes, women, the young and those over 65. Already, over a third of those who've lost work because of the impacts of COVID-19 have been stood down without pay; and that shifts to 42 per cent for over-65s. More than two thirds of casual workers who've been in their current job for less than 12 months have lost shifts. Not one of those is eligible for JobKeeper payments.
Already there are more than 1.2 million Australians who are determined to be current - that is, entitled to be paid JobSeeker payments on the Centrelink payment system and not in receipt of a zero rate of payment. And over 800,000 business and sole traders have applied for the JobKeeper package.
But, as Swan told Stiglitz and viewers: "Australia doesn't have a plan beyond September." Both of those schemes, funded as they are now, end late September - and it's hard to imagine they will be fixed by then.
So what then? It's so important we don't head straight into cuts and more cuts.
Cassandra Goldie, chief executive officer of the Australian Council of Social Service, spent the last decade of her life campaigning to raise the rate of Newstart, as JobSeeker was formerly known. She's terrified that the government will rush to austerity, will start to cut at its first available budget. Now the rate's been raised, she says, it must stay where it is.
"We can't make the mistakes so many made post the global financial crisis," she pleads.
Goldie says we must retain income support for people most at risk, and the government must continue to give cash assistance where and when it's needed. Considering the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe, predicts Australia's unemployment rate will soar to double digits by June, there's no way we will be in good enough shape to suddenly cut all that cash from the economy in what is now just five months. Lowe said he hoped the rate would be lower if business could keep employees on fewer hours - but that still means less cash to spend on essentials, let alone cash to splash.
While that's a must, now is the time for the government to fix the mess it has made of human services. A couple of weeks back I wrote about the extraordinary efforts those who work for Centrelink are making to work through the huge backlog of claims. Human Services (now called Services Australia) has been massively de-humaned, and we see the cost now. We've seen the urgent problems at Centrelink and in providing home care packages. Those cuts could easily be overturned to create new and permanent jobs, employment specifically designed to support those who've been hurt by the pandemic.
But ACOSS's Goldie also urges the government to use its power and start to invest, invest, invest.
"Invest in job-rich economic and social activity," she urges. "Now is the time for us to do it."
Do it quickly. Start now. ACOSS has put forward proposals for big spending on social housing and on other forms of infrastructure, including investments in energy efficiency.
Jeremy Thorpe, PwC's chief economist, is confident the government will reassess JobKeeper and JobSeeker before the October budget. "I think we will have a new scheme for extensions and reiterations," he says.
Beyond the government supports, he says everyone has a plan - but the big challenge will be stimulating consumer confidence. That requires people to have an income to spend and to be confident in staying healthy.
"We can't lose sight of managing the risk, finding a balance," he says. "Managing that's going to be a challenge."
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Thorpe says every level of government in Australia is thinking about "growth opportunities", as he describes them - how to create jobs in this environment. He too mentions social housing, and then mentions unblocking development.
Let's not go that far.
What governments need to recognise now is that Australians are partners in the recovery. Just as we've responded to social isolation and distancing, just as we've sanitised our hands and faces to within an inch of removing all traces of skin, we can be part of snapping back. Not that we will actually snap back.
We will slowly unfurl and get back to where we belong.
Goldie describes the way Australians responded to everything governments have asked of us as extraordinary. Kind, supportive, and mostly agreeable - except on running paths and in the toilet paper aisle.
Remember the hideous way Joe Hockey divided this nation into lifters and leaners?
That was never true. And that slur has finally been exposed for the lie it was. We all turned out to be lifters, especially of each other.
- Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.