The end of hu-vanity: the coronavirus will change the way we interact with each other

As the GFC's evil twin, the "GCC" is already its better in terms of human suffering and economic destruction.

Terrifyingly, it may just be getting started.

Post-pandemic, airlines won't fly as many planes or employ as many people.

Grounding its international fleet and severely clipping its domestic wings is not how Australia's most global brand wanted to mark its 100th year.

Airlines are high-cost enterprises relying on a lot of expensive discretionary travel, a big staff and huge capital investment.

Qantas is reported to have about $2 billion in cash reserves but has outgoings over the coming six to 12 months well in excess of that. Its wages bill last year exceeded $4 billion, which tells you all you need to know about why it has stood down two-thirds of its 30,000-strong workforce.

Virgin, which has taken more drastic action, is in an even weaker position and that has Qantas worried that its smaller rival could be partially nationalised as the government seeks to protect jobs and competition in our skies.

Yet in truth, an equity stake by government in both carriers cannot be ruled out as the neo-liberal vanities of small government and market-based everything confront a worldwide nemesis with an even more selfish ethic.

Airlines are not the only businesses facing drastic change.

All around the economy, longstanding production and consumption patterns which have dictated the cost-base and physical structure of enterprises are being mugged by frugality.

And with that comes a root-and-branch re-examination of the way work is organised, how we travel, socialise, shop, and even plan our cities.

Just consider the untold trillions globally ploughed into CBDs, roads, and mass transit in the last few years alone. All based on centralised work/travel patterns of a pre-COVID-19 industrial economy.

Everything now faces change.

Little wonder the wartime parallel favoured by some leaders resonates.

After all, this feels like war - one fought against a determined enemy - stealthy and lethal.

Yet so novel and ubiquitous is the COVID-19 threat that even the world-war metaphor falls short.

Where invasion calls ordinary citizens to arms, uniting them in selfless nation-reinforcing patriotic defence, COVID-19 implores us to separate and retreat.

Cowering in our houses, neighbours become the enemy as we withdraw from society, eschewing all but the absolutely necessary.

Psychologically, it is a double burden -- the daily casualty count of a real conflict like WWII, overlaid with the gnawing uncertainty and perennial fear of the nuclear Cold War that came after. Ich bin ein Berliner all 'round.

This great hunkering down would be hard enough without the uncomfortable realisation that nations must attack themselves rather than the enemy, to survive.

Meanwhile, many vanities of a frittered prosperity are exposed. Our easy global movement for one which became the main vector for transmission.

Our underfunded hospitals and primary health infrastructures for another. Decades of anti-tax politicking, funding cuts, workplace casualisation and, just in time, inventories have left little in the way of surge capacity.

Then there's our unwillingness to prepare for the super-bugs we'd been so often warned about.

We're spending $80 billion on dubious submarines to be delivered from the mid-2030s to protect against an unknown aggressor, but had not stocked up enough personal protective equipment - including surgical masks and sanitiser - for a pathogen attack that could happen without warning.

One thinks of the climate change failure here, too, a clear problem we keep deferring on shallow economic grounds despite it getting worse.

COVID-19 brooks no such quibbling.

When it is finally controlled, the world will have changed in countless small and big ways, and we're not talking GFC-style changes in prudential regulation.

So pervasive is this shock that the social and economic fabric will be permanently altered.

The Sydney Morning Herald on March 18 put out its first paper in 189 years without a physical newsroom. Newsrooms had been considered essential. Now, the question arises, why fund them into the future?

Similar questions will be asked in knowledge and service-based businesses the world over.

Mere possibilities for virtual meetings have suddenly become necessary, and, guess what? They work - internet willing, of course.

Broadcasters such as the ABC and Sky News are suddenly making programs utilising distributed technology - slick studio sets with perfect sound and impressive backgrounds have given way to nostrilly camera angles, zero make-up, low resolution and roomy sound.

The occasional impatient pet aside, the substance is still there. Production values considered central to broadcasting have been revealed as peripheral.

Improvisation is the new black as workplaces find cheaper ways of doing things.

Scott Morrison met his Singapore counterpart, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, on Monday by video link after the latter's visit to Canberra was cancelled due to coronavirus.

It worked well, raising the question for leaders: "Why attend so many meetings in future?"

It's an open secret that 99 per cent of the work at APEC, G20, ASEAN etc is done by officials ahead of time, meaning virtual meetings could easily handle the predominantly pro-forma leaders' bit.

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A second digital revolution is under way in which the adequate is being revalued upwards because personal contact is anathema.

And it goes way beyond government and media.

Employers and employees are doing it all differently now because they must.

Schooling, university lectures, customer consultations, telemedicine, coaching - all delivered remotely.

Perhaps the biggest combustible in COVID's bonfire of the vanities is the aforementioned international travel.

We cosmopolitans delight in our world citizenship, our familiarity with other cities, foreign cultures.

Yet on environmental grounds we know the cost.

Executives lace the globe attending this meeting and that conference.

Is some of this face-time necessary? Certainly. All of it? Unlikely.

Will employers keep paying now that the alternative methods of interchange have been stress-tested and found to work?

Qantas hopes so, but it's no doubt already preparing for a more modest world.

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