Echoes of Great Depression as Australian jobless queue for help

38% ? Announcing 6 months of closure will add another 62 to that number.

queues stretched around the block at unemployment offices around the country as the forced closure of pubs, casinos, churches and gyms began at midday on Monday.

The service based economies that many rich countries have transitioned to over the past few decades seem particularly vulnerable in this sort of pandemic.

This is a huge fail from the Oz government. Over 80,000 people lost their jobs on the weekend and today all pubs and clubs are closed adding possibly another 200,000 people in NSW alone. They did nothing to prepare for the swamping of Centerlink. The website has crashed and people will be camping overnight to get into Centerlink tomorrow. The Oz government has offered a lot of financial assistance, but have made it nearly impossible to get it.

This is going to effect more people than the virus will, the focus should have been protecting those most at risk not an entire shut down of a country.

I really think that this kind of apocalyptic language is not helpful. In my view it has directly contributed to the huge impact this has had already had despite minor loss of life and short duration to date.  Talk of Great Depression and Spanish Flu and Black Death and so on that is all the rage (plus our ever present celebs updating us constantly on their status and so on) and just stokes panic and fear.   As is so often the case, the rich will benefit from this.  For those with cash, this will represent a wonderful investment opportunity at some stage in the future.  Asset prices will rebound in the near future.

Italy is making themselves a very bad example among the so called "first world" countries. Now every one is in panic that this will happen to them as well if they don't react in most extreme way possible

So stupid that people have to show up in person to register for Centrelink. Also that website is a joke under normal circumstances. Hilariously, the government said that it didn't crash because of too many Australians trying to access it, but that is was a DDOS attack.

Was thinking on the train today that being forced to stay at home will also create huge stress on relationships between family members and roommates etc. If such lockdowns go on for too long it's not hard to imagine violence and anarchy taking over cities as people are forced to steal food and other essentials because their source of income was suddenly cut off. Something like an apocalyptic Hollywood flick.

Thanks for nothing, china.

If you had been honest about the virus instead of hiding it for months, things wouldn't have been this bad.

At least Aussie being honest about it. And they're coming up to winter. Likewise, NZ. Don't want half your population rushing to hospitals, do you? Good move.

@wesley

Very few governments are being "honest". But that's what happened in the last great pandemic of 1918/19. Those communities that were upfront about it and isolated and worked to contained it, had very few deaths. See San Francisco in the US, for example. Contrast that with Philadelphia.

History probably repeating itself.

Got to say so radical not to say draconian a response to the current level of infection/deaths does smack of a panicked knee-jerk reaction rather than a reasoned, holistic strategy.

Why?

They aren’t Italy

Got to say so radical not to say draconian a response to the current level of infection/deaths does smack of a panicked knee-jerk reaction rather than a reasoned, holistic strategy.

I disagree. Italy did nothing and the spread was huge once it is well established its horrific. Get on it early and lock down before it is well established and save thousands of lives. Call it what you like, but I call it good sense and a life saver.