Some of this is about Our Esteemed Leader and why he acts the way he does which is of no interest to me at all, but most of it is a survey, from Canberra, of course, about what's happened, what has been done, and what we've learned. In other words, the Big Picture that we sometimes couldn't see at the time.

One thing I learned is that the nation was just lucky to have a prime minister who's a pragmatist. Contrary to his usual scorn for experts, he decided to value the expertise of the public service and the Chief Health Officer, thanks to Stephen Kennedy, a Treasury Secretary who was a nurse in a past life and therefore has what Murphy calls a flicker of emotional intelligence. Lucky for us that Kennedy's PhD in economics examined whether changes in economic outcomes had an impact on people's health.

Fortuitously, Kennedy had conducted research on the economic impact of a pandemic, his interest triggered by avian flu and SARS. Back in 2006, he was the lead author of a departmental working paper that had concluded that a highly contagious pandemic could knock 5 per cent off GDP during the first year. (p.37)

Lucky for us that Kennedy knows how to win people over to positions. A 5% drop in GDP is the kind of number that would give pause to any PM focussed on the Big End of Town and a belief in Trickle-Down Economics. Lucky for us Our Esteemed Leader accepted Kennedy's recommendation of discretionary fiscal policy because even a small number of deaths would have a large, short-run economic impact. [It would have been nice to have a PM who cared about the deaths for compassionate reasons, but that, it seems, was a luxury we had to do without.]

'Discretionary fiscal policy' is just another name for economic stimulus, a label that Our Esteemed Leader steadfastly refuses to use because of the ideologues in his party and a long history of berating My Side for using it during the GFC to stave off recession. And although it wasn't enough — and Murphy clearly doesn't accept that there were no ideological reasons why some groups were not eligible for Jobseeker and Jobkeeper — anyone who saw those terrible, heart-breaking queues of people lined up at Centrelink because hundreds of thousand of jobs were lost, would have to concede Kennedy is a bit of a hero.

Will this new reliance on expertise last?

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/11/30/the-end-of-certainty-by-katharine-murphy-qua... ( )