OK, so it's not exactly in line with Isaac Newton's 3rd law of motion, but it's the best paraphrasing I could come up with in the circumstances. I thought of the title when I was musing over the events of the last couple of weeks and grappling, as I often do, with how little I understand modern times. In particular, I have been puzzling over how individuals, organisations and governments now react to bad things and how this has changed drastically from when I was a child growing up in the 1970s. You tell young people the story about how when someone in your school class caught chicken pox, parents would rush to organise a play date with the infected child so you could catch it as well and get it over with, and they observe you with horror and look like they want to report your now nonagenarian relatives to the child support agencies. For the record, there's no hard feelings Mum.
Nonetheless, for whatever reason, community attitudes to risk have swung around from a fairly relaxed stance 40-50 years ago to an almost zealous avoid-at-all-costs viewpoint. Don't get me wrong, I am all for any form of non-intrusive initiative which reduces the risk of danger to the community, such as compulsory seat belts in cars and increasing the SPF in sunscreen to a level where it is actually going to stop sunburn. However it's where a measure that is taken to stop or prevent something happening is either clearly ineffective, insulting to one's intelligence, or generates a worse effect than the thing it is trying to stop, that's when my grumpy old man blood starts to boil.
Dealing with banks is a great case in point. As anyone who's applied for a business loan recently would know, due to worries about money laundering or bank accounts being used for illicit purposes, the process that they put you through to apply is completely out of control. I have personally spent hours and hours filling in a bunch of forms that are supposedly meant to inform the financier about the borrowing entity and stop this sort of thing from happening. And yet, due to internal incompetence at the banks, the problems continue. Both CBA and Westpac have recently been involved in massive scandals as a result of customers using accounts for all sorts of illegal and immoral purposes. Is it any wonder people get exasperated by having to conform to a tortuous regime some officious compliance drone has dreamt up but is a complete waste of time?
Some friends of mine who still work in large organisations also get frustrated with the increasing number of compulsory seminars and training they have to attend about things like workplace sexual harassment and occupational health and safety, and which distract heavily from the main purpose of their job. 20 years ago when I worked at Macquarie Bank, they had the balance fairly right. By law, they had to put you through this training so you were aware of your obligations as an employee, but then by and large they left you to go about your business. If you then went and groped a colleague at the bar later on without their consent, then you'd been warned and you'd face the consequences. However the butt-covering mentality is now such that companies feel obliged to treat their employees like 2 year olds. For god's sake, most people are clever enough to realise that if some milk gets spilled in the kitchen, they might slip if they walk in it. You don't need to pay some health and safety officer $250,000 a year to point this out.
And don't even start me on air travel. The notion that some neanderthal waving a wand in your general direction or making you put a lid on your shaving cream is going to make your flight more safe is complete nonsense. However, if these people insist on looking down your underpants and you react in a way you normally would if someone did that to you, namely by abusing the bejesus out of them, they won't let you on the plane. To quote a great line from Jeremy Clarkson about this very issue, it makes your teeth itch with rage.
Which leads me to the current brouhaha we are facing with the Coronavirus. Are the measures that are being put in place around the world an overreaction to the threat? Much though I would like to say "yes", in fairness I think it's probably too early to tell. You can however compare statistics from the current epidemic to past strains like SARS (2003) and swine flu (2009) and the numbers of reported cases and deaths worldwide certainly suggest this is more serious and nasty strain. On the other hand, according to Department of Health statistics, the death rate is quite low (only been 3 deaths so far in Australia), yet a normal flu season kills on average between 2500-3000 people here each year. However, it is not the usual practice to do things like shut down major events or ban travel during a regular flu season, so you could argue, why is this so much worse that we need to do it this time?
One good thing I suppose is that unlike their ham-fisted handling of bushfire season, the government is this time listening to experts and acting on their recommendations. However, they also need to be very aware that if these extraordinary measures stay in place for any length of time, the consequences for not just the economy but for people's every day lives are going to be extreme. Already job losses are mounting heavily in the tourism and hotel sectors, some people are going to lose their houses, and if schools shut the disruption to families trying to manage both jobs and school aged children is going to be horrendous. As someone with a daughter doing VCE this year I really don't want to think about it.
Much though it fills me with dread to say these words, I just hope the government knows what it's doing.
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