Comment

First there was the ceasefire, ushered in by the pandemic. Now, Scott Morrison says, is the time for unions and the government to lay down their weapons and come to the table to negotiate the terms of the peace. As a show of good faith the prime minister has put away the stick – shelving the Ensuring Integrity Bill, for the time being. What’s being offered as a carrot is less clear.

At the National Press Club on Tuesday, Scott Morrison went all medical as he framed his prescription for economic recovery. Key ministers in the room smiled their nodding approval when he said: ‘At some point you’ve got to get your economy out of ICU. You’ve got to get it off the medication before it becomes too accustomed to it.’

It was only three months ago that the prime minister stood up in parliament to make his latest report on the progress of Closing the Gap. Just two of seven targets, he revealed, are on track to be met by 2025. The gap itself is a difficult concept. By its very nature, improvements do not always mean it is narrowed. For instance, while Indigenous mortality rates and child mortality rates have improved slightly, so have those for non-Indigenous Australians, meaning the gap remains – and Indigenous children still face a mortality rate twice that of their non-Indigenous peers.

“This is all about balance,” Angus Taylor says of his long-awaited technology investment road map. In reality, it is all about delay, and distraction. After nine months of work, surveying 140 technologies, the road map has managed to tell us what was already known: that solar and wind, both of which produce zero emissions, are the cheapest forms of energy. But Australia will not be taking these findings and quickly decarbonising our grid with renewables.

Just at the moment the government claimed vindication for a big win on the world stage, China ridiculed its grandstanding. A terse, one-paragraph statement from its Canberra embassy called Australia’s response ‘a joke’. If anything encapsulates how fraught relations are with our biggest trading partner, this was it.

In 2018, my life changed forever. From being stateless, after seven years held in refugee detention, I became a permanent resident of the United States. The outcome is beyond words. Building trust in humanity was the most difficult part of my new life. I was free but, emotionally and mentally, I was still a prisoner. I, like other refugees, have not managed to overcome these emotions.

If 2GB was a crime family – if you can imagine it – Ray Hadley would be a violent foot soldier and Alan Jones would be the plotting, vengeful don. Ben Fordham would be adopted as a favour to his parents. With Jones’s retirement, radio loses an ugly voice. It loses a little of its racism and some of its misogyny. It loses some antique slurs and curious bigotry and graphic rhetoric. Most of this will be replenished or reimagined. Like sunlight, prejudice is inexhaustible. What won’t easily be replaced, and what made Jones different, is his capacity to manipulate power.

Gadfly, along with an anxious nation, was looking forward to last weekend’s Catholic Boys Daily. Surely, it would be bursting with explanations from all the favourites on how the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse got it wrong in its unredacted report on the state of Cardinal Pell’s knowledge about the Ballarat Paedophile Club.

If anybody needed reminding, the Australian economy is in deep trouble, much deeper than either the treasurer or the prime minister realised at the beginning of last month. Then, the talk was of a ‘snapback’ from the damage of the coronavirus pandemic; now it is of a ‘sobering’ economic impact in ‘very difficult’ and ‘uncertain times’. Making these times even more uncertain is our biggest trading partner, China, none too subtly firing the first shots in a trade war.

This weekend, Australians are emerging from the lockdown that placed the country into quasi-hibernation for almost two months. The emergence of coronavirus has ignited an economic conflagration on a scale only comparable with the disruption caused by the Great Depression and World War II. How these health and economic crises now interact with one another as they play out will deeply change and affect the lives, health and prosperity of us all.