Zombie Cash-Splash: Australia’s Treasurer Ramps Up Orgy of Corporate Hand-outs, As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 23 October, 2020.

 Zombie Cash-Splash: Australia’s Treasurer Ramps Up Orgy of Corporate Hand-outs

By Michael West

“Australians know there is no money tree,” said Australia’s Treasurer Josh Frydenberg at the apogee of the coronavirus in May. But there is. The Reserve Bank is creating money out of thin air. It’s called QE. Michael West reports on the latest fruits to fall from Josh’s fertile money tree, particularly free cash from a hitherto hidden measure in the Budget.Thanks to the legion of large and profitable corporations claiming JobKeeper subsidies, the government has unleashed an orgy of corporate welfare on a scale which has never been witnessed before.

But at least JobKeeper makes sense. At least, despite the rorting, it has saved thousands of Australian businesses from obsolescence.

What makes no sense is that the Treasury – or somebody with influence – has devised a scheme to turn the Tax Office into a bank to prop up zombie companies with cash. We are referring to the measures interred in the minutiae of the 2020 Budget papers which allow companies to get cash back from the Tax Office if they can show a loss this year.

Already, the cuff-linked spivs from the Big End of Town will be concocting assorted loopholes to dud the ordinary taxpayer again.

Here’s the relevant bit: “… enable corporate tax entities with an aggregated turnover of less than $5 billion to carry back a tax loss for the 2019-20, 2020-21 or 2021-22 financial years and apply it against tax paid in a previous financial year back to the 2018-19 financial year”.

To translate, you can claim back the tax your company paid in previous years if you make a loss this year, or somehow manufacture a loss.

At the behest of government, it is the Tax Office which has already been running the corporate subsidy schemes, channeling JobKeeper into businesses, whether they are profitable or not.

Bankster Bailout: will the trickle-down package trickle beyond the banks and big business?

It is the ATO which has been paying small businesses the amount they would ordinarily pay – as deductions from their employees’ salaries.  

Now the government is mandating the ATO to return tax paid before the pandemic, when business was good, to businesses which run up tax losses now that business is bad – just the sort of business loss makers that won’t attract the willing lenders.

It’s a rewrite of legislation passed by the Labor Government for 2013; and then repealed. New Zealand does it. So does the US. It’s cash.

So it is that Australia’s best and brightest financial scammers will already be figuring out how to get it. High depreciation charges, for instance, help to create tax losses, especially as depreciation is an accounting entry, not a cash outlay (there are special rules for businesses with turnover less than $10 million which get an extra free kick here to help create a paper loss). 

Nothing for innovators, everything for zombies 

And there are timing issues to get it just right, to get the loss and to get the cash back. This is free money; like franking credits it is not a rebate. It involves money paid to the ATO (going back to 2018-19). That money is now sitting there, like money in the bank, waiting to be withdrawn.

All it takes is to fill out a form.

Is there anything to say this free money from these “loss carry back offset rules” can’t be simply paid out in dividends to shareholders or bonuses to executives? No, the law which said you could only pay dividends out of profits is long gone.

Is there anything to stop the money being lent to directors? No.

Is there any reasonable explanation? None that we could discover. There is nothing in it for start-ups, for innovators, but plenty in it for companies which would otherwise be now trading insolvent, or dead. 

If the media were to work this out, and perhaps ask some questions, the government would say it was all about jobs. 

The “Blokey Budget” of 2020 has already attracted criticism for favouring rich over poor, men over women and old over young. The “Loss carry back offset rules” will simply entrench the ballooning inequality.

Spend and lend

The driving thought behind the Coalition’s thinking is “spend-and-lend”. And the method is privatisation, as foreshadowed here, privatisation which has meant a bonanza for the banks this year:

Privatisation Fetish and QE: will government surrender the economic rescue to the banks?

In line with its Trickle Down Theology, the government is hoping taxpayers will spend their tax cuts; it is hoping the banks lend their free money to fund investment.

And what free money it is. Besides the $52 billion in new money which has already been created by QE (the Reserve Bank buying bonds from the banks and crediting their accounts with cash), there is another lurk, a very large lurk, which will send more billions into bank coffers.

We are referring to the TFF (Term Funding Facility), which has been increased to $300 billion. The money supply, or new money created, increases by the amount of Commonwealth bonds bought the RBA plus the amount borrowed under the TFF.

In a speech a couple of weeks ago, RBA Assistant Governor Guy Debelle, put this figure at $130 billion. (Bear in mind, the TFF only gets to $300 billion if the excess is lent to small and medium businesses. – something which is unlikely to happen – they are too risky for the banks. SMEs are the ones that go to the ATO for the new no-questions-asked money under the tax-back scheme.

What can the banks do with this $300 billion in ultra-cheap finance from the RBA? They are supposed to lend it, to get the economy going. That is the intent of the plan.

Just as taxpayers are supposed to spend their tax cuts to fire up economic growth, the banks are supposed to lend to businesses to fund investment. That’s the theory.

But there is nothing to say they can’t use it to buy Australian Government Securities, or bonds. If there is more money to be made trading bonds, which is likely, the banks will use the cheap money to buy bonds then sell them to the RBA.

Do the grandchildren really pay the debt? The problem with Scott Morrison’s plan for recovery, and MMT

This is how the fiscal love triangle works. The banks borrow from the RBA’s TFF at a bargain-basement 0.25%. They use that money to buy bonds from the government then the RBA buys the bonds from them. The RBA then credits their accounts and, presto, billions in new money created.

Losing their religion

It passed with barely a fuss; a faith lost, a creed betrayed. 

The Coalition creed of fiscal virtue that is. For years we have heard from the Liberals and their ideological allies at News Corp and Nine about the virtue of managing the Australian economy like a household budget. This fiscal rectitude is the very foundation stone of Liberal policy and politics.

Then suddenly it happened three weeks ago. Former prime minister Paul Keating went public with calls for the government to forget its budget fetish and stimulate Australia’s Covid-stricken economy. Spend money.

“This was a very nasty, personal, vindictive, unnecessary, misguided attack by Paul Keating,” shot back Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Then, only a few hours later, the reverse ferret. The Treasurer declared stimulus was now the priority, forget the surplus.

Already, without admitting it in so many words, the government had been practising MMT by “printing money” to the tune of $52 billion. It just wasn’t the way Paul Keating was suggesting.

Purple House and MMT: new money creation is real, it is not a “leftist” conspiracy

Rather than the RBA buying bonds directly from government, to create new money, the government had privatised its money printing by outsourcing it to the banks. That is the banks buy the bonds and the central bank buys them from the banks.

This is very much in line with the long-standing conservative few that the private sector does things more efficiently than governments, that wealth given to the upper echelons of business will trickle down to the hoi polloi.

Hence the government’s tax cuts for the rich and the billions in free money to the banks. Unfortunately, it is a punt on whether the rich will spend it rather than saving it and the banks will lend it rather than trading it for profits.

The spending and lending is supposed to be about creating incomes for others. 

Taxpayers buy coffee, household goods, holidays, go to see a band at the pub and get someone to mow the lawn; creating incomes for waiters, shop assistants, and performers and gardeners.

Businesses go to their bank and get a loan to buy a new fit-out, a new coffee machine, a better forklift, replace the cool-room, get a sheet metal machine, pay a monthly fee for a new accounting system; while tradies and techies install the lot. Each purchase creates a new order for another business which in turn places another order with its supplier – and the banks hope to get their money back.

It all relies on spending and lending. That’s the theory.

The practice might to turn out to be more “save-and-select”.  And herein lies the problem.

Instead of spending, taxpayers may save their tax cuts, paying them straight to their bank to get rid of the compound interest they’ve incurred during the mortgage repayment holiday; sensing it’s better to create more equity in their homes than having a night out.  Or they may give it straight to the landlord to avoid being told to vacate the premises.

And instead of lending; banks choose among their field of borrowers, looking for borrowers with some collateral left, those with low-risk cash flows who are more likely than not to have the wherewithal to service yet another loan.  Those large companies protected by the government from failure.

Sure, the government says the banks and mortgage-brokers don’t have to do as much paperwork to justify a loan, despite what a Royal Commission may have suggested, but the banks still want cashflow and collateral, before letting a single dollar escape their doors.  And lots of small and medium sized businesses are sitting in rented premises, with high fixed costs, intangible IT, plenty of whiteboards, an entrepreneurial spirit and uncertain cashflow.  Not much to mortgage.  Those businesses have to survive on someone providing some new equity, not on another loan.

The government knows that big business funds elections and small business votes. 

So small business will be placing a lot of faith in the government’s spend and lend theory.  And big business is be grateful the RBA came out early, backing the debt and deficit budget, ready to provide somewhere between $200 and $300B to the banks to on-lend for good projects and to buy government bonds while those projects take time to take shape.

Ironically, no bank will lend to a business without a business plan and the wherewithal to pay back the loan but the RBA, thanks to this new-fangled cash-back scheme, will give cash to failing businesses no questions asked. Free, no interest.

Are Thatcherism and Reaganomics your best answers, Josh?

Further to the irony, it is JobKeeper subsidies and the watering down of lending and insolvency rules which has created this new class of companies, the zombie companies, which will now be preying on their next source of welfare.

If the government had just given money to those who actually needed it, those who would definitely spend it, or the RBA simply bought the bonds directly – rather than via the banks – and spent it on social housing projects and the likes, they could have guaranteed spending while actually helping people who needed it.

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Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, As Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 11 October, 2020.

 

Sea of Waking Dreams

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, University of Western Australia

Review: Richard Flanagan, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Penguin Random House, 2020)

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, is one of a slew of novels one expects to emerge from the shadow of the 2019–2020 bushfire season that darkened the skies of eastern Australia for weeks on end, scorching forests from Byron Bay to Kangaroo Island.

A rolling incineration of large swathes of the continent, the sky itself seemed to have been on fire, from the uncanny pink-disk sun of smoke-choked Sydney in November and December to the apocalyptic scenes at Mallacoota on New Year’s Eve.

In Flanagan’s novel the collapse of the planet’s ecosystems happens in the background. The story itself is mainly occupied with something which must be trivial by comparison: the dying of 87-year-old Francie in a Hobart hospital.

Francie’s three children have come together to deal with the demands of the situation. While Anna and Terzo have long left Tasmania behind them (or so they thought) for high-flying careers on the mainland, Tommy has remained. Tommy is a failed artist and speaks with a stutter that appeared when a fourth child, Ronnie, died by suicide following abuse suffered at a Marist boys’ school.

The novel mainly follows Anna. A successful architect living in Sydney, she reluctantly answers Tommy’s call to return to Tasmania when their mother’s health turns for the worse. The novel traces the breaking down of all the things Anna has put up to convince herself she was no longer in that place.

In the face of a scarred country, Anna must return home and face the scars of her family. Photoholgic/Unsplash

What place? Not Tasmania, but the invisible, traumatic centre of family life — all the failures, evasions, dirty compromises swept under the carpet only to reappear with surprising exactitude each Christmas.

Or, when a parent dies.

Losing a mother; losing a world

In this respect, Flanagan’s novel resembles Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or HBO’s Succession.

While Succession, with its ageing mogul patriarch Logan Roy, is loosely based on the Murdoch dynasty, it does not really depend on a media empire at stake. Its heart is the tawdry machinations of the infantilised children as they jockey for advantage, trying to win the game of imaginary approval driving sibling rivalry.

In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams it is a matriarch rather than a patriarch slowly, messily and unevenly passing out of the world. Yet, while Logan Roy is a monster and Francie a saint, the effect in the adult children is exactly the same.

The brilliance of Flanagan’s story and the deep power of this novel is in our witnessing of the end of the world. The death of Francie opens up a black hole in the family drawing Anna, Terzo and Tommy into its implacable singularity.

What does it mean to face personal grief when the world is ending? Charles G/Unsplash

At the same time as this family’s little world is collapsing, the world itself is in its own end times. Ash rains down from the sky and one ecological catastrophe after another interrupts Anna’s social media feed. This conjunction presents a new form of what is called the pathetic fallacy, in which we project the world of our inner emotions and moods onto the natural world.

A sullen sky, a bright morning, a funereal forest — some basic animism in us takes the world to be the sounding board of our affects. It is a symptom of the Anthropocene these affinities have become planetary.

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Read more: How the term ‘Anthropocene’ jumped from geoscience to hashtags – before most of us knew what it meant

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Is Flanagan’s novel an ecological novel? The luxury of choosing has now all but gone.

We no longer have to turn our minds to an ecology forcing itself into our lungs and washing up on our every shore. The novel has a dimension of allegory, but it is no longer clear which direction it is flowing.

Our missing parts

The pathetic fallacy was thought to serve the psychic needs of people by offering them a consoling mirror in the natural world, but what if its true point was to turn our subjective misery into ethical environmental action?

Certainly, the moribund Francie seems an emblem of a dying maternal nature. The ever greater efforts her children expend on keeping her alive evoke the desperate rear-guard actions to prevent this or that catastrophe.

The children attempt ever greater efforts to keep their mother with them. National Cancer Institute/Unsplash

But the novel’s most persuasive ploy is not based on the redeployment of sympathy. At regular intervals, Anna realises she is missing a body part. It begins with a missing finger. Later her knee, then a breast, an eye. Others, too, start to lose body parts.

These “vanishings”, as they come to be known, are entirely painless and seem to go almost unnoticed. It is as if, we are told, they have simply been photoshopped away.

The uncanny part is not the loss of the limb, but the fact the phenomenon is going unremarked. This is what extinction feels like. Something is gone that was once there. We are briefly confused, but then we reassemble the picture and push on.

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Read more: Australian writer Richard Flanagan wins the Man Booker prize

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Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Professor, University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australian Medical Association’s Reputation Destroyed in Covid Chaos, A Sense of Place Magazine, 11 October, 2020.

 

Do No harm.

So goes the most basic maxim of medical practice.

Yet many hundreds of Australian practitioners have done exactly that, with senior health bureaucrats standing side by side with the nation’s grandstanding politicians as they impose draconian, counterproductive lockdowns.

On 5 October, The Australian’s economics editor Adam Creighton wrote: “In the first six months of the year, there were 134 fewer deaths from respiratory diseases in Australia, which includes pneumonia and influenza, and 617 additional deaths from cancer compared with the average over 2015-19, according to the ABS’s provisional mortality statistics.”

And this is just cancer.

Does the AMA accept any responsibility for this perverse outcome?

How many other avoidable killer ailments have gone undetected because the AMA has given medical cover to the politicians’ fixation on coronavirus to the criminal neglect of other deadly illnesses?

Frequently changing rules, grotesque exaggerations on the dangers of Covid-19 and poor political messaging have all sown panic and confusion in the Australian population, frightening terrified people into not seeking early consultations, screenings and treatments.

Outrageously, members of the Australian Medical Association have been front and centre of the disaster.

Australians have an unquestioning and exaggerated respect for doctors.

The sight of government medical officers stepping up to the lecterns in lockstep with the nation’s politicians has lent credibility to some of the most truly absurd dictates this now benighted nation has ever seen.

The most shameful performances have been preserved for the nation’s Chief Medical Officers, who have allowed themselves to be used for the grandstanding tactics of politicians while ignoring some of the world’s leading intellects who are questioning in the bluntest of terms the veracity of lockdowns.

The AMA now finds itself increasingly compromised, with a significant number of its members implicated in the biggest social and financial meltdown in Australian history and the implementation of dangerously misguided policies under the guise of a public health emergency.

At the same time, increasing numbers of their members are speaking out against lockdown policies and the AMA’s complicity in them.

Australians have seen the squandering of eye watering amounts of money by the government, the quintupling the national debt, the throwing millions of people on to the dole queues and truly shocking scenes of police brutality on Melbourne’s streets.

And all this destruction of the country has been accompanied by a pantomime of health bureaucrats having their moment in the sun, or more precisely the television cameras.

They’ve never felt so important.

The problem with Australia’s public service is the same as with all bureaucracies, they reward conformity while discouraging creativity and original thinking as a threat to the comfort’s of their taxpayer funded status quo.

Rather than encouraging outliers, people who “think outside the square”, those who rise to the top of health bureaucracies have inevitably got there due to their obeisance to the government agendas of the day.

Members of the Australian Medical Association have been front and centre in sowing this panic and lending plausibility to political and government agendas being shoved down the throats of the general public under the cover of Covid.

These include, most egregiously, the advancement of mining interests after Prime Minister Scott Morrison appointed his good friend, millionaire mining executive Nev Power, to head the Covid Commission.

An outspoken critic of lockdowns and a member of the Australian Medical Covid Network Dr Guy Campbell has implored the AMA to stop supporting hard lockdowns before its’ reputation is blighted, “which it will be”.

“The AMA has opened up to the non Covid 19 consequences of Government policies on Covid 19, so it begs the question then why the AMA still supports hard lockdowns?”

This article, Inhumane Lockdowns Compound Australia’s Covid Fiasco, by Dr Guy Campbell has been widely welcomed, shared and commented upon many hundreds of times.

In an Open Letter to the AMA Dr Campbell makes the following points:

More and more countries are coming round to accepting we may have to learn to live with the virus as the health and economic costs of repeat lockdowns are too high to be justified.

As the costs start to bite widely and the pain is felt, people will look for targets to blame.

Politicians are adept at blame shifting and the medical community may suffer high reputational damage.

The AMA should pre-empt this by starting to distance itself by not supporting hard lock downs and saying publicly that they provide the medical expertise and advice, it is for governments to make and implement policy with a balance of health, social and economic policy.

Unfortunately for the AMA, the warning has come too late.

We have already entered the Era of Recrimination, as Steve Waterson at The Australian demonstrated with his prominent piece “An Epidemic of Stupidity”. He wrote: “We’ve handed control of our lives to a clown car packed with idiots who have wasted billions trying to defeat this virus. They will never admit it was all for nothing.”

In a response to Dr Campbell’s concerns the Association claimed:

“The fact is that the credibility of the AMA is not in doubt and we are not particularly concerned at this point given the broad community support for the lockdown among Victorians, with the latest poll showing that even 57% of Coalition voters support the lockdown.”

That, with all due respect, is an absurd response.

To make as your greatest defence the fact that a poorly educated population such as Australia’s can be successfully manipulated into believing a scare campaign based on false hope and inaccurate date is patently ridiculous.

The mob are notoriously fickle.

When they realise how easily they’ve surrendered their freedoms for no reason at all, when they realise how utterly and totally they’ve been misled, they will turn violent overnight.

The Biggest Mistake in History: Debating the Great Lockdown

As one of Australia’s most distinguished academics, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University Ramesh Thakur has noted:

“A clear divide is emerging between health bureaucrats and ‘ivory tower’ modelers, on the one hand, and clinical practitioners and GPs, on the other.

“The former are the most hawkish lockdown advocates and supporters. The latter are the ones who are seeing and having to deal with the unintended, perverse and growing health and mental health consequences of lockdowns.

“It is astonishing the extent to which the theoretical scientists and health bureaucrats remain in denial about the health damage of their policies and in violation of the Hippocratic Oath.”

The AMA needs to be careful and scrupulous in ensuring it reflects the breadth and diversity of views among its members and in the profession. Otherwise it will lose credibility, respect and influence.

PROFESSOR RAMESH THAKUR

Do No Harm!!!! Yet while the intellectual argument for lockdowns has been lost the Australian Medical Association continues to advocate shockingly destructive policies, particularly lockdowns. Leading epidemiologists from many of the world’s most elite tertiary institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and the Australian National University have come out condemning lockdowns as counterproductive. Yet the AMA has continued to perpetrate these discredited policies.

Even in the past week, more than 500 doctors and medical experts have petitioned the Premier of Victoria Daniel Andrews to immediately cease that state’s lockdowns, raising concerns over the alarming and growing human toll caused by Victoria’s COVID-19 response.

The Covid Medical Network says that the current restrictions are unnecessary, disproportionate and must be lifted, in a statement posted to their website today.

The response to the virus will cause more deaths and result in far more negative health effects than the virus itself, it says.

The Victorian Government is doing more harm than good. The ongoing physical, psychological, social and economic harm is creating a new health crisis that far outweighs any possible benefits from continuing the lockdown.

DR EAMONN MATHIESON, SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF THE AUSTRALIAN COVID MEDICAL NETWORK

A Sense of Place Magazine asked for a response from the Australian Medical Association to this call. Although clearly a subject of interest and concern to the nation’s doctors, we were advised that this was a matter for the Victorian government. We therefore put the following two questions to the Victorian Premier via his press secretary.

1. Has Daniel Andrews seen and read the statements from the Australian Covid Medical Network calling for an end to lockdowns? 

2. Does Daniel Andrews intend to alter his approach as a result of the concerns being expressed by hundreds of Australian medical professionals?

All we got back were a few weasel words “Attributable to a Victorian Government Spokesperson”.

“Every decision we’ve made since the beginning of this pandemic is based on advice from the health experts and we’ll continue to work with them to keep Victorians safe and slow the spread of this deadly virus.”

Hundreds of Australian Doctors Call for an End to Victorian Madness

But that experience with the drolleries of government spin merchants hammers home the point: the medical profession is being used to perpetrate political and social policies inimical to the best interests of the public.

Just as mobs are notoriously fickle, so are journalists. They hunt in packs. They can turn on a dime.

And Australia’s journalists have turned, exposing the flagrant exploitation of the Covid panic by the nation’s politicians and the absurdity of the government’s policies.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison clearly hoped the Covid Panic he helped create would resurrect his battered reputation, which suffered badly thanks to his truly inept performance during last summer’s bushfire crisis.

Before Covid came along to rescue him, he was dragging himself and his party into an electoral savaging.

But why should his battered reputation be rescued by the AMA and its members?

Around the world the debate on lockdowns has already done a 180.

Professor Thakur suggests that the recently released Great Barrington Declaration, a call for an end to lockdowns from some of the world’s most distinguished epidemiologists and health professionals, should act as a clarion warning to the AMA.

“The GBD, now signed by over 200,000 people including 20,000 public health scientists and medical practitioners, shows that there is a strong strand of dissent around the world from the dominant narrative, including some extremely eminent and experienced professionals from various walks of life.”

The Declaration opens with the words: “As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. 

“Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.”

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.“

Professor Angus Dalgliesh is a London-based oncologist with more than 30 years’ experience in cancer practice. Recently he wrote of his anguish on learning of the suicide of two colleagues resulting from the mental stress of the lockdown restrictions-induced loneliness and isolation.

“My concern about present policy led me to become one of the founding signatories on the Great Barrington Declaration,” he explains. 

It is long past time when the AMA should have stopped propping up government actions which are clearly having a devastating impact on the health of millions of Australians and which are now being widely condemned by members of their own profession.

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Feature Image: Bourke St. Mall is deserted in Melbourne, Australia, by Chris Putman of Zuma Press.

This piece was written and compiled by veteran Australian journalist John Stapleton. A collection of his work is being constructed here.

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Lockdowns Wrong: The World Experts Australia Ignored, as Editor, A Sense of Place Magazine, 8 October, 2020.

 

Lockdowns Wrong: The World Experts Australia Ignored

The Great Barrington Declaration

Some of the world’s most distinguished doctors and public health scientists have called on governments to stop the lockdowns which have had such a devastating impact on Australia.

A public statement, known as The Great Barrington Declaration after the town where it was drawn up, was authored by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor at Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School.

At the time of writing the statement, known as The Great Barrington Declaration, has been signed by more than 100,000 people:

Medical & Public Health Scientists                                              3 708 

Medical Practitioners                                                                     6 201 

General public                                                                             91 177 

Aus                                                                                                  1 247 

Canada                                                                                            4 243 

Germany                                                                                         1 822 

NZ                                                                                                     236 

UK                                                                                                50 978 

USA                                                                                              30 917

The move has received significant press coverage globally, including from the BBC and The Guardian.

Signatories include mover and shaker within the Australian medical profession Dr Guy Campbell, who has been urging the Australian Medical Association to fulfill its responsibilities and take a public stand against lockdowns.

Australia’s own Professor Ramesh Thakur of the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, also a signatory, has had a profound impact on the debate in Australia, fulfilling his role as a public intellectual by backgrounding journalists across the political spectrum.

Unfortunately federal and state governments have ignored not just Thakur but many of the world’s leading epidemiologists, all of whom warn that lockdowns don’t work.

Instead Australian governments continue to shamelessly sow panic and confusion in the population for their own electoral advantage.

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The Great Barrington Declaration in full

As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. 

Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people.

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.

The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. 

Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing.

We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. 

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.  the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity. 

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.

THE GREAT BARRINGTON DECLARATION

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside.

A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. 

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.

Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching.

Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open.

Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

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