Australia careened head over heels into the lockdown, with announcements of still tighter restrictions following on each other every few days in early March until finally on March 23, seven weeks ago but who's counting, we arrived at those Centrelink queues that stopped hearts in Parliament House as well as in homes around the country.
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Then came the money, thrown with equal vigour and head-spinning speed to incentivise businesses to spend, and when that wasn't going to work, to help them stay open, and when that wasn't going to work, to help their workers pay the bills via the dole and the wage subsidy.
Now comes the grand opening. And the question is will Scott Morrison's enthusiasm for getting the pistons of capitalism moving be sufficiently cooled by caution?
Not only was the government's heart turned by the terrible queues of the overnight unemployed, its head has been made to hurt by its troublesome stimulus. The free childcare that failed to require centres to actually accept children, the JobSeeker unemployment benefit that crashed the Centrelink website and overwhelmed the public servants processing the paperwork, the superannuation scheme which has been defrauded forcing a suspension, and the JobKeeper program that has caused so much confusion and so many anomalies.
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From the start, Morrison wanted to avoid, in his depiction, the mistakes of Kevin Rudd's global financial crisis stimulus, so he insisted on projects that channeled money through existing structures - the Tax Office and Centrelink - and he wanted to avoid schemes that could go wrong, as with the Rudd insulation scheme. Unfortunately for Morrison, the pesky complexity of real businesses and the uneven commitment to altruism means things are going wrong.
The best way to fix all of that is to get everyone back to work asap, and despite the rhetoric on Friday, he's not moving slowly. Morrison wants 850,000 workers back by July. He is already hinting that JobKeeper's days might be numbered, with the six-month wage subsidy already facing review just as the first payments went out.
The chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, stood beside the prime minister on Friday talking about "cautious, gentle" steps and "not doing too much at once".
"We don't want to lose the control we've got," Murphy said, looking a little like he might be losing control of the federal cabinet.
Outbreaks are not a reason to slow things down.
- Scott Morrison
While the federal government might want society chugging again, the states were largely more cautious on Friday. Under the decisions of the national cabinet, restaurants, cafes, church services, swimming pools, open homes, can all reopen in this first stage, albeit with 10-person limits. But it is up to the states what activities they allow and when, and they weren't rushing to open up on Friday.
NSW and Victoria are having a think over the weekend; the ACT is allowing easing rules a little on weddings, funerals, open homes, churches, boot camps and gatherings, but restaurants remain closed other than takeaway. Andrew Barr even implausibly said it would take "many many months" to step through the three stages, an idea at odds with the July finish line.
Morrison is telling us we can't stay under the doona forever. We must not be "too timid", we must not run from danger and "outbreaks are not a reason to slow things down". In Victoria, Daniel Andrews counters with we can't get so frustrated and impatient that we go too fast.
As that tension plays out, Australians will likely have reason to be grateful for their ungainly federation which bakes slowness and inconsistency into its cumbersome structures and in doing so will allow us to experiment a little with what works and what doesn't as each state pokes a nose or a foot out from under the doona.