Originally Posted by
Xeptu
Well both of those things will happen, you just need to be patient. Being an Airline discussion it comes as no surprise you think the way you do. A pandemic hasn't happened like this for 100 years, Airlines are the first effected and the last to recover when there's a crisis, an industry hazard. The last 30 years of growth in air travel hasn't happened before either, you have grown up with it, it's natural to think that is forever. Well nothing is forever, airlines will again be deeply impacted by something like this, all it would take is an armed conflict to break out between China and the USA, that would be even worse than a pandemic. One thing is for sure air travel will change one way or another eventually. It's just another issue we can't keep ignoring, like plastics in the ocean.
Conveniently didn't answer the question though.
"A vaccine will come, I promise". Standard politician speak.
So I ask again, what do
you foresee as happening if a vaccine (or quick test as you said)
doesn't become available? Should the desire of those 2.2M people in WA outweigh the wishes - and the
constitutional right to not be penalised based on their state of residence - of the other 23 million Australian citizens to keep the WA border closed?
I think the way I do because I look at the big picture. A statistical human live in Australia is valued at $4.6M AUD ($4.2M 2014 adjusted for inflation)
Source. The political response to this pandemic, including border closures, lockdowns, etc, has seen a
$90 billion turnaround in the budget, from a projected $5B surplus to an $85B deficit and it isn't stopping there. The statistical value of that is nearly 20,000 lives saved, true. But that is only the current cost - not the costs going forwards which I reckon would be an order of magnitude higher. To what end? We lost more people from the common
flu last year, and much more again in 2017. Hell,
lung cancer kills nearly 9,000 people every year -
yet Governments refuse to ban tobacco!
The response to this pandemic needs to be proportional and reasonable, yet a border closure while effective yes, is not the be-all and end-all, for the judge in the recent Palmer v WA trial found other
reasonable alternatives exist to a hard border closure. Mandatory hotel quarantine has been found - legally - to present no increase in risk to the current border closure. In WA's case, though, the issue is one of capacity.