It may seem hard to consider it now but having the world on lockdown will hopefully lead to a lot of good things happening.
The first thing is a complete change in how we work. With so many people being forced to work from home and doing it successfully, the old reasons that companies had against people working from home are being decimated. IT departments have had to scramble to scale up their VPN deployments and laptops are scarce, the NBN is taking quite a beating, but otherwise everything else seems to be going well.
Public transport is flowing well, peak hour traffic is mostly drama free, people are spending more time at home engaging with their family. Even the environment is winning with less cars on the road. And with office buildings closed up, all those fluro lights are off too.
Another huge impact is that people are finally washing their hands! What they were doing before baffles me but everyone is getting crazy anal pedantic about hygiene.
But I think one of the most important impacts of this pandemic is exposing so many people to the reality of the dole. I’ve been on Newstart when I was stuck between jobs and it’s not all smoking joints and watching TV. There is a lot of stress, juggling which bills to pay, what food you can afford, how you can tighten an already tight budget.
A lot of the people that used to complain about dole bludgers getting their tax money are now on the dole themselves, here’s hoping this will open their eyes, and their hearts.
Hopefully we come out of this pandemic with more compassion for others and with a greater appreciation for the need to spend more time with family than in an office.
I think generally someone with a conservative viewpoint takes more notice of things directly affecting them personally, meaning that once this blows over they will return to disdaining social welfare.
For the kind of permanent change we want to see, we’ll need the virus to kill more of us.