Comment

He knew. When he walked into Melbourne Magistrates’ Court in 1993 beside Gerald Ridsdale, a man facing dozens of counts of indecent assault against boys, George Pell knew the priest had been abusing children in the church. According to redacted findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, he had known it for more than a decade.

Death and the plague. Whenever Gadfly reaches for his well-thumbed Pears’ Cyclopaedia he finds that plagues turn out worse than everyone had hoped. What does this pattern of history mean in regard to Schmo’s “snapback” or the impressive “V-shaped recovery”? All the economic pundits Gadfly can discover say the PM’s smoking something.

It’s been a long six weeks since Australia’s governments first imposed economy-crushing lockdowns to flatten the coronavirus curve. Scott Morrison has no doubt the pain has been worth it, saying ‘thousands of Australian lives have been saved’. Now he’s leading the charge to get back to business as soon as possible. He adds the qualification ‘safely possible’ but he is taking a huge gamble, risking a relapse that could only lead to a deeper recession.

The response was clear and immediate. Within minutes of launching the National Museum of Australia’s project to record our collective experiences of the coronavirus, scores of people across the country joined in to share how they were coping with the crisis. ‘I’ve been waiting for something like this to start,’ one woman wrote in our Facebook group that first day.

The worst part of madness is that it hurts other people. These are the kindest words that can be said about Clive Palmer’s newspaper ads, claiming he has bought 32.9 million doses of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19.

Australia’s relationship with its biggest trading partner, China, has plunged to depths not seen since formal recognition of the Communist-governed state 48 years ago. The stakes for Canberra could not be higher, with business leaders and exporters privately furious at the government’s bumbling diplomatic performance over China and coronavirus.

As a long-term campaigner for disadvantaged students and the schools that overwhelmingly enrol them – public schools – I was gobsmacked this week by the sudden concern our federal government expressed for these students, and the risk they are getting left behind during the Covid-19 lockdown.

It is tempting to believe Australia will emerge from this crisis a kinder and fairer country, that something will come from the common experience of isolation, that our obvious frailty will make us gentler and more compassionate. It is tempting but by no means given. From these odd, unnumbered days will emerge a country changed but not necessarily better. It will be the work of the next few weeks that decides if Australia is remade or shoddily put back together. The difference is immense.

No matter how hard Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his senior ministers try to ignore Malcolm Turnbull’s explosive memoir, it simply will not go away. And for that, the deposed PM is far from apologetic. During a lunchbreak this week from the media blitz flogging A Bigger Picture, Turnbull told me he had written history and to do it truthfully you have to include faithfully recorded private conversations and communications.

Conflict doesn’t stop for a pandemic. In this way, Australia is a lucky country. We enjoy a relative peace. Beyond our shores though, there are communities that face the destructive dual perils of war and Covid-19. From Syria to South Sudan, Myanmar and Yemen, families who survived gunfire and shelling must now prepare to endure this invisible threat. But they shouldn’t have to do this alone – by its very nature, a pandemic demands a collective global response.