Yes, we could use this pandemic and the global economic aftershock as a learning curve!

But will we!? As the robber baron class and their political lackeys mount a rearguard action?

I predict, on the cards! With on or two notable exceptions by inherently decent human beings still equipped with NORMAL human empathy!?

We could use this event to just jettison idiotic idealogy and replace it with enduring (a keeper) bipartisan pragmatism!.

Done with a virtual wartime cabinet responding to a state of a declared emergency. All manner of pragmatic outcomes are doable that actually unite us and needed as never before! Including the mothballing of state parliaments.

The first pragmatic decision would be, to lift our self imposed embargo on nuclear power/foreign investment and R+D This will unlock billions if not trillions!

Allow Autralia to become a rent a hole for the world's current stockpile of nuclear waste!

Second, helicopter government grant/start-up money into co-ops and small family entrepreneurial enterprise! With any profitable recycling endeavour front and centre/power and water provision next!

At the same time, assisted by a massive once in a lifetime, big government project! Even where that requires temporary guest labour, whose skills must be transferable!

That big project is the, very rapid rail link, along the eastern seaboard.

And essential de-privatisation of our electric power grid!

Vehicle manufacture could restart as a specialist, workers' co-op building electric right-hand drive vehicles from a single site that markets directly to the end consumer only!

As for funding all of this as above?

We have a three trillion dollar super fund needing some long term surety to survive and prosper.

That very surety is inherent in, self-terminating, government-guaranteed, tax-free, thirty-year bonds. That pay 7% P.A. 3.5% as the interest component and 3.5% as capital repayment and as the same annual amount, in real terms, for the life of these self-terminating bonds!

We need to outlaw money shuffling middlemen, who effectively double the cost of living/doing business! And commissions need replacing with salaried sales folk! If only to restore predictable sanity to the market place!
Alan B.

If the author believes that his communism where rich professionals like him can keep poor people in poverty and hunger is going to be successful, good luck. Communist everywhere have realised they are in a dreadful mistake and are trying to get out of it. Then drop kicks who are rich, like him, are trying to drag us back into it, it's amazing. Alan B subscribes to the same lunacy and still thinks that government can do something successfully despite all the evidence against.
Urban in Hungary is governed by his parliament which is streets in front of all communist regimes ever but the trick cyclist won't have it. This loss of reason and belief by medico's that they know better than us is pathetic and sad!
You want less consumerism then suggest we pay professionals less and see who agrees. Hint, it will not be any professionals.

the dumbing down of the masses by the education system including universities is highlighted by this article.

I see the Wuhan virus as another life form doing what other forms of life do: feed.

Isn't that what we humans are - feeders?

Unfortunately some of our species just happen to like Wuhan bat soup.

JB, your profound ignorance is on display for all to see.

Anytime there is a downturn, the government steps up to the plate!

As REPUBLICAN Roosevelt did with the new deal! And set the U.S. and us up for a sustainable recovery from the Great Depression, followed by a post-war period of unprecedented prosperity.! And it's not government money but the taxpayers; money.

Yes, there will be unparalleled debt and the way to draw it down, genius, is with unparalleled economic growth. And the contraction to date, quite massively exceeds the deepest part of the Great Depression!

If at the end of the day we wind up with rapid rail and the world's cleanest, safest cheapest power! And all that is possible along with myriad manufacturing co-ops. And deserts converted into productive gardens!

And wouldn't be the first time an economic miracle was predicated on cooperative capitalism, be it the unassisted Japanese post-war recovery, To, for a time to become the second-largest economy. Plus all the Asian tigers and last but not least, the Celtic economic miracle

I get you don't want to see that happen for what ever reason? Possibly through a completely infantile fear of unconventional nuclear power? Maybe you're right? maybe the sky will fall?

But I don't think so!

Given in the paradigm I've outlined, for every one dollar invested by government, in growing the economy, there is a 2.5 dollar return!

And if that money is invested in the cooperative enterprise, i.e., co-ops? Then every one dollar does the work of seven or more through the usual economic flow on factors. The government recoups it/our money via increased taxes and economic activity!

And the kids inherit a terraformed and vastly, fairer, more unified and egalitarian, improved Australia and an economic superpower!

All doable if we just stop listening to the naysayers and the latter-day Luddites, just like yourself?

Who would have us sit on our hands or wait for the robber barons to start handing out food stamps instead?

If you can't/won't help? Get TF outta the way!
Alan B.

The truth is actually the opposite to J Bowers statement that the Chinese communists have suppressed the masses.

Over sixty percent of the population fits into the middle class and above. Of course this has been ably assisted by the gift for free, of the productive element of Western manufacturing. Of course, this leaves the West with a diminishing middle class and a greater divide between the haves and have nots.

So this points to the success of Communism doesn't it?

Dan