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Only now, hopefully not too late, we are beginning to understand that all that stands between us and the plague’s most horrifying effects is good government, something which we have sought to destroy for some decades, deriding it, dismissing it, downsizing it, underfunding it, and, as witnessed when the Morrison government returned to power, hectoring and bullying it.
And so we reap our bitter harvest.
A system of thought, an idea of the state, a way of running nations, a grossly unequal economy, all that began 40 years ago with Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society, must end with the way we respond to this deadly virus.

Richard Flanagan
March 28, 2020

If the battle cry of our government’s response to the global financial crisis was “go early, go hard, go households”, this government’s approach to the current crisis seems to be “go late, go half-measures, and go ... well ... go to Hillsong”. For a decade we have been accused of having gone too far in our efforts to avoid the GFC. When we look back on the decisions taken over the last month, they will be seen (as with the bushfires) as the mark of a complacent and negligent government.

Kevin Rudd
March 16, 2020

I don’t expect politicians to know Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism or the Diels–Alder chemical reaction (although I can dream). But you can’t insult science when you don’t like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can’t give on demand.

H. Holden Thorp
March 13, 2020