relief of distress

Comrades,

The current Pando got me to thinking this must be the just about the first time they've closed all the Sydney pubs in the 222 years of white settlement?

Well, not quite.

Seems it's a one in 100 year event. They closed all the pubs back in February 1919, re-opened them in March, and then shut them again in April through to the end of May, to deal with the "Spanish Flu" pandemic. They even show down all the Sydney race tracks, heaven forbid! Then they closed the border with Victoria, which produced a Constitutional outcry and shit-fight over the right of free trade between the states: "that's not what we signed on for!" cried the Mexicans. After successfully herding the incoming infected into the North Head Quarantine Station for a few months producing 49 corpses, 'Patient Zero', known as "S.L." arrived unannounced in Sydney on 24 January 1919 and the last NSW town to report the appearance of the disease was Dorrigo on 27 September 1919, according to the NSW State Archives. That's a long time between drinks. More than six thousand died in NSW alone, when the white population of the entire continent was about where Sydney is now - five million. This, after Australia had just lost 60,000 war dead.

The current Great and Glorious Leader of the Great State of New South Wales, the Hon. Gladys Berejiklian, has been less than inspiring in her public appearances and utterances to date and of little, if any, practical help to anyone at all. (In all the acres of old growth forest that have been felled to fill the vast number of advice pages that have suddenly sprung up to give you no end of terrific ideas on how to do idling and go about biding your time - while panicking and going slowly insane at the same time - nothing's been written along the lines of "Tips from the 30's! How to live through a Great Depression! Survival of the Fittest!". That'd just be scaremongering.)

With everyone now furiously scrambling to heavily back the horse called Self Interest, don't know if the Preeemier of NSW has any flow charts, or even white-board mud maps going on this one, but Glad surely would sure be glad of one of these blueprints - whipped up by the Public Service back in '19...

CLICK TO ENLARGE (NSW Govt, Organizational Chart, Pneumonic Influenza Epidemic, 1919. Source: NSW State Archives.)

The arch-Conservative Fed Govt has suddenly become remarkably Pinko, giving away stupendous quantities of free, brand new, freshly printed cash left, right and centre and they're now even moving to effectively nationalise the country's payroll. In Canberra, that must feel like a cheese-grater being run all over the 'every man for himself while we look after our business' ideology of ScoVo and his pack of Capitalist running dogs. Next thing, they'll introduce a Universal Basic Income. Christ Almighty! Menzies is already revolving at 78rpm in his poor, shallow grave.

What's missing, of course, is leadership - let alone a Central Authority, so why not devolve the relief effort to a Superintendent of Relief and the Joint Local Committee's of Relief? You know it makes sense. It may sound a bit Commo, but it's not rocket science, and it works. It certainly made the authorities sit up and take notice of the true extent of existing poverty and destitution in Sydney back in 1919. Not a lot has changed. And as far as compo for businesses went in '19, only a fraction of the money set aside was actually paid out, while the rest were dealt with by a mysterious "adjustment for loss" achieved through creative book-keeping, and God-only knows there's a whole lotta that going on right now. They'd learnt their lesson from The Panic of 1890, which led to Australia's worst depression ever, lasting nigh on a decade. The economic set back from Spanish Flu was not terribly long lasting for that reason - but we don't learn, because no-one ever listens.