Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Australia's Covid Response" with Economist Steven Hamilton

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"Australia's Covid Response" with Economist Steven Hamilton · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and few issues are as dangerous
• 0:08
  as charged as emotional as government's responses to COVID.
• 0:13
  What happened during the pandemic?
• 0:15
  The lockdowns, the economic support, the failures, the successes, uncomfortable conversations
• 0:20
  as a show is not about manufacturing uncomfortable conversations in the studio where I make people
• 0:27
  uncomfortable or try to, I don't know, coerce them into situations that aren't comfortable
• 0:33
  for them.
• 0:34
  Rather, the uncomfortable refers to the fact that we talk about topics that if you were
• 0:38
  to raise them at an office Christmas party or at a picnic or at a barbecue or at the
• 0:43
  pub or the bar, it would make people uncomfortable to hear someone speak stridently about these
• 0:49
  issues.
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  So I try to tease them out in a sane and moderate and conciliatory way so that we can have
• 0:54
  those difficult conversations, those uncomfortable conversations in perhaps quite comfortable ways.
• 0:59
  And within the subset of issues around COVID and government's responses there too, I would
• 1:07
  say that Australia looms pretty large for a lot of people outside of Australia as either
• 1:14
  a lesson in what you should do or should not do during a pandemic.
• 1:19
  There's nothing that will get an American that Thanksgiving more riled up than mentioning
• 1:23
  Australia's pandemic lockdowns, and you will instantly tell what side of the political
• 1:27
  spectrum they are on by their subsequent line of questioning and their pronouncements
• 1:33
  on the issue.
• 1:34
  So today's guest has conducted the one of the first major, complete, comprehensive economic
• 1:42
  and public health analyses of what happened in Australia, how it compares to performance
• 1:47
  in other countries, he is not a blind like Australian, you know, but yes man, he doesn't
• 1:54
  work for the Australian government, he is a former economist at the Australian Treasury,
• 1:57
  so he started out there, but he's now an assistant professor of economics at the George
• 2:00
  Washington University in Washington, DC, and he comes at this as an economist, but not
• 2:07
  just as an economist with regard to what can make us the most money, but an economist
• 2:11
  with regard to how do you design policies to get the most out of human behavior essentially?
• 2:16
  It's almost like the free economics of the pandemic, actually that's quite a good title.
• 2:22
  I think I'll call this episode the free economics of the pandemic because he's really good
• 2:26
  at kind of interrogating, well, if you did things like this, then how would that change
• 2:29
  people's behavior and how much of people's behavior is a reaction to enforced lockdowns
• 2:34
  and how much of it is a reaction to the fact that there's a pandemic swirling around?
• 2:38
  Anyway, he's currently visiting fellow at the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at
• 2:41
  the Australian National University.
• 2:43
  He's done a lot of research on the effective taxes on human behavior, with the interest
• 2:49
  of designing better tax policy, and as a result during the pandemic, he was called upon a
• 2:54
  lot, both by governments, but more so, actually, by the media as an expert about how the hell
• 2:59
  we should be handling this thing.
• 3:00
  He's published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, he was called upon by the New York
• 3:04
  Times, by Time Magazine, Newsweek, and The Atlantic, and he's now put all of his wisdom into
• 3:09
  a book that he's written with his colleague Richard Holden.
• 3:12
  The book is called Australia's pandemic exceptionalism.
• 3:16
  Please enjoy as much as I did, the one and only Stephen Hamilton.
• 3:20
  So, there's a lot to talk about, and you managed to cram it all into a surprisingly entertaining
• 3:27
  and interesting book.
• 3:28
  I got to say, I loved it.
• 3:31
  We should start with what we know about how well various countries did, like how would
• 3:35
  one even measure such a thing?
• 3:38
  I mean, look, there are many outcomes.
• 3:42
  I think the two that you would focus on, I think, are deaths per capita, right?
• 3:48
  How many people died as a result of COVID per person?
• 3:51
  Obviously, more people died in bigger countries, and the other one is, you know, maybe you
• 3:55
  could say something like GDP per capita, right?
• 3:57
  So how much economic destruction was there?
• 4:00
  How much destruction of life was there?
• 4:03
  Right.
• 4:04
  How much did it cost?
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  Did it kill?
• 4:06
  Yeah.
• 4:07
  And I think, usually, I think people would have in their mind that these two things are kind
• 4:10
  of a trade-off, right, that you want, if you want to save lives, you're going to give
• 4:16
  up something on the economy, right?
• 4:19
  Or if you want to go full on, let the economy be untouched, you're going to have to kill
• 4:24
  some people, right?
• 4:25
  Let her rip.
• 4:26
  And it didn't work like that at all, right?
• 4:29
  We had both among the highest GDP per capita performances and the fewest deaths.
• 4:37
  And so that's, I mean, one of the insights I think in our book is that this traditional
• 4:42
  focus on trade-offs just did not apply in COVID, the way that we normally would think of
• 4:47
  it.
• 4:48
  Right.
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  And the reason, well, I want to throw a third metric in there because you would also want
• 4:53
  to care about liberal democracy human rights, right?
• 4:58
  Because I mean, yeah, presumably you could get the GDP up and the law and the health statistics
• 5:04
  up by literally imprisoning it.
• 5:06
  You could weld it in time.
• 5:07
  Yeah, you could weld everyone in time.
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  Which happened, which happened in time.
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  Richard, my co-author, you know, wrote in the book, you know, we could literally have
• 5:14
  welded door shutters.
• 5:15
  I said to him, can you just check that that actually happened?
• 5:18
  Right.
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  And it, yeah.
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  And it did.
• 5:21
  Yeah.
• 5:22
  They literally did.
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  So you could have gotten both metrics up, of course, of course.
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  But I, and let's, I mean, yeah, the issues that multifaceted, we can talk about lots of
• 5:31
  different things.
• 5:32
  But we should also imagine, we should also not imagine on the liberal democracy part,
• 5:37
  on the freedom part that are letting COVID rip with all of its consequences would ensure
• 5:46
  people had freedom.
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  Because yes, so this is what I was about to say as well in terms, so the reason why there
• 5:52
  isn't the traditional conflict that people think is because human beings are not automatoms
• 5:59
  who go about their daily lives, regardless of the conditions around them, when they're
• 6:04
  at risk of getting really sick for a couple of weeks and maybe ending up in hospital and
• 6:10
  maybe killing their elderly aunt, they modify their behavior and that behavior modification
• 6:15
  of not going out to the pub when it might get you really, really, really crook means that
• 6:21
  you don't spend money on beers and that means the economy goes into a massive recession.
• 6:25
  So there's a way.
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  There's good evidence from the US that we cited the book that there was this self lockdown
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  phenomenon, that the mere existence of COVID extrapolating from, you know, government lockdowns
• 6:42
  where there was big reductions in, so big, big reductions in economic activity, even
• 6:47
  if the government didn't restrict activity.
• 6:50
  Yes.
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  In fact, one of the most interesting, you've got the book is packed with interesting anecdotes
• 6:56
  and data points where if you're a bit of a nerd, you'll find them fascinating.
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  One of them is that there was a study of areas of the United States that intersected with
• 7:06
  a bunch of states where there were different lockdown rules in each state.
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  You might be at a quadrant of like where four states intersect and people commute to work
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  across them and they tried to unpick what the variables were in order to establish how
• 7:18
  much of the reduction in movement is taking place because of rules and how much of the
• 7:23
  reduction of movement is taking place because people are choosing not to move around and
• 7:28
  socialise anyway.
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  Because you have these rules that are sharply defined across a single suburb or neighbourhood
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  in some cases if there are cities that are sitting on the boundary of states and they found
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  it was something like 17% or something or 17% or you know, it was less than a fifth
• 7:43
  of the change.
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  The majority was due to self, vast majority was self-initiated.
• 7:48
  And you can look at those states but you can also just look at Sweden.
• 7:51
  Right, so Sweden is the poster child of the like letter-riff strategy.
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  Now they didn't let it rip but they were much more liberal and they had significantly
• 8:00
  worse economic and public health performance than Australia.
• 8:04
  So again.
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  And then then neighbours.
• 8:07
  Yeah, well, they certainly had worse health outcomes, they had more deaths than their
• 8:11
  neighbours.
• 8:12
  Yes, definitely.
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  So and then we get into a tricky situation where you ask, you know, how many deaths are
• 8:20
  we willing to tolerate, you know, what are we willing to do in that space, right?
• 8:24
  And you know, I'd acknowledge that there, we shouldn't deny that there are any trade-offs,
• 8:30
  right?
• 8:31
  We shouldn't deny that there aren't costs, right?
• 8:33
  I mean, at the end of the day, but when you're just denying that there are costs, basically
• 8:37
  saying it's a false dichotomy to choose between do we make the economy good or do we improve?
• 8:43
  Here's the way we explain it in the book.
• 8:45
  The first thing is to say, we have a virus.
• 8:49
  It's spreading exponentially and we have a pretty good idea of its sort of lethality.
• 8:56
  We kind of have a reasonable sense of how many people it's going to kill, right?
• 9:01
  And it's a virus.
• 9:03
  And so if it's left to its own devices, it will spread exponentially, right?
• 9:08
  And that will lead to certain outcomes.
• 9:10
  Now if we can take action, if we know that eventually people are going to take actions
• 9:17
  themselves, they're going to do self-lockdown, that's going to harm the economy, that's,
• 9:22
  you know, eventually the curve is going to bend, right, which it does.
• 9:26
  What curve?
• 9:27
  Like the case curve, right?
• 9:30
  So you look at, you know, if you don't put in measures, it's not like the virus goes
• 9:35
  to infinity, right?
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  Eventually.
• 9:37
  Doesn't everyone eventually just get it?
• 9:39
  No, it kind of, we get a standard curve that kind of bends.
• 9:46
  Now the question is, I mean, haven't we all had it at this point?
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  But in a wave, you know, a single thing, in the single sort of cataclysmic, the sort
• 9:53
  of the first, right?
• 9:54
  You'll get outpriced, right?
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  And I would say, or you can, earlier on, take actions to kind of bend the curve, or in
• 10:05
  our case, this is kind of what the subtitle of the book is, crush the curve, to kind of
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  avert that situation.
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  And you have to ask yourself, what do you gain from doing that, right?
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  And so the way we thought of it in Australia, and I think it was the right way, is we're
• 10:22
  going to keep spread through measures so that the virus will not spin out of control.
• 10:27
  Okay?
• 10:28
  So we're going to make sure that that's the thing we don't give up on.
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  We're going to, we're going to keep what we call R, the reproductive rate below, reproduction
• 10:35
  rate below one.
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  And then the question is, okay, given we're going to do that, we're not going to let the
• 10:40
  thing spin out of control, how we're going to, like, how we're going to achieve that.
• 10:44
  Right.
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  Right.
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  And in that space of R less than one, we've got lots of choices.
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  I see.
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  And then that's where the trade-offs kick in.
• 10:53
  I think so.
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  But the trade-offs don't kick in with, because what you're saying is that if R is more than
• 10:58
  one, and people will remember R, I think we're talking, you know, we probably haven't
• 11:01
  talked about it in a few years, but you know, in 2020, everyone was learning something
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  about R, right?
• 11:06
  The R one or the whatever.
• 11:07
  Yeah.
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  R, an R above one, means that the average person is transmitting the virus to more than
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  one person.
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  So it's going above its reproductive rate, and anyone who's studied, you know, how compound
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  interest works, or exponential curves knows that if it's above one, it's only a matter
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  of time before you're, you know, doubling in a heartbeat, and then it were off to the
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  races.
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  And countries where that, where that was allowed to spread rapidly, led to death rates that
• 11:34
  were extremely high.
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  Right.
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  Just very high.
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  Northern Italy, New York, initially, hundreds of times higher than in Australia.
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  And, you know, there were all sorts of other negative consequences like, you know, breakdown
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  kind of health services, you know, economic dislocation through the self lockdown thing.
• 11:52
  So I think we can, I'm perfectly comfortable to say, once the thing's spinning out of control,
• 11:56
  you've got kind of costly outcomes on all dimensions that like, we don't want to go there.
• 12:01
  Yeah, right.
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  So if the R below one means that the virus is under control, that each person is, that
• 12:08
  the number of people who are infected is either stable or exactly.
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  And you can be, you can be, you can bring our way below one.
• 12:16
  Yes.
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  In which case, you know, you're locked, you know, you're welding the door shut, you're
• 12:19
  doing all this stuff, or you can bring it more modestly below one.
• 12:23
  Yeah.
• 12:24
  These are all choices.
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  And so what you're saying is that you, you need to take it as a given, essentially,
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  that are, that all of the possible universes that belong to the category are above one.
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  You just roll out.
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  Our inferior as a class.
• 12:38
  Exactly.
• 12:39
  Exactly.
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  And so, you know, we're not just doing all of the different areas that are less than
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  one.
• 12:46
  Yeah.
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  And therefore, you don't even really, well, that's my consider, though, those scenarios,
• 12:51
  right?
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  And then we say, okay, the tricky questions then become among the choices with R less than
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  one, which are worse than the others.
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  And a good example is, we could, and this is where you get to the kind of stupid stuff,
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  not a park bench with no one else around.
• 13:10
  And you find them, the first city on a park bench, right?
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  Does nothing for R.
• 13:18
  Right.
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  What does that do?
• 13:20
  What does that achieve exactly?
• 13:21
  Right.
• 13:22
  So all the, you know, the authoritarian group of people, I mean, I asked that same question
• 13:26
  and people, and I would get that answer because I saw the police harassing a guy who
• 13:29
  was lying alone on a beach who was sunbathing, right?
• 13:32
  Because he wasn't exercising.
• 13:34
  Yes.
• 13:35
  He wasn't alone on the beach with my kids running about and exploring rock pools.
• 13:38
  Sure.
• 13:39
  That qualified as a legitimate activity because it was exercised.
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  He was lying down.
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  That's recreation.
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  That wasn't permitted.
• 13:44
  Yeah.
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  People at the time would say, you need to enforce compliance.
• 13:48
  It's a thin edge of the wedge.
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  It's a slippery slope thing.
• 13:51
  I'm not convinced by that.
• 13:55
  But okay.
• 13:56
  But all I would say is, that's a really, what is the marginal impact on spread of that
• 14:03
  measure versus its cost?
• 14:05
  And I think the cost-benefit ratio is pretty poor.
• 14:10
  Yeah.
• 14:11
  Take another example.
• 14:12
  Yeah.
• 14:13
  Should we close a school or should we close a bar?
• 14:15
  Okay.
• 14:16
  Definitely the school.
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  School starts to buzz a phone.
• 14:20
  So that's a question, right?
• 14:22
  You have to ask yourself, both of those, maybe both of those, reduce R by the same marginal
• 14:27
  amount, right?
• 14:28
  And so then you have to make a choice about which you think is more socially valuable.
• 14:32
  Right.
• 14:33
  And the conversation should have been.
• 14:34
  And I think within the space of R less than one, governments across Australia made a whole
• 14:39
  bunch of decisions, which didn't make a lot of sense.
• 14:41
  Yes.
• 14:42
  And we can talk about those.
• 14:43
  But I mean, the problem is also that this decision that we're going to keep the R under
• 14:47
  one has to be made very early and very hard and very fast, right?
• 14:50
  Yes.
• 14:51
  Because I assume that you would not agree with the kinds of human rights violations and
• 14:56
  upending of our norms that would be needed to bring R under one if you've given the
• 15:01
  virus eight months to rip.
• 15:04
  No, it's kind of dynamic in the community.
• 15:06
  No, no, it's done that.
• 15:07
  This is sort of what the UK did where like they initially were like, yeah, let's just
• 15:10
  let her rip.
• 15:11
  And then after everyone was all over the place and uncontainable, they were like, oh,
• 15:15
  shit, let's lock down.
• 15:16
  Well, that was the lock down is exactly.
• 15:18
  And what's funny there is like the UK said, I mean, everyone remembers the framing flatten
• 15:24
  the curve.
• 15:25
  Do you remember that?
• 15:26
  It was all about flatten the curve, right?
• 15:28
  This was in early March, 2020, flatten the curve, flatten the curve, flatten the curve.
• 15:32
  And then that went away.
• 15:33
  Remember, we didn't talk about flatten the curve anymore, because that was like a failed
• 15:36
  strategy.
• 15:37
  Right.
• 15:38
  Flatten the curve was, we don't need R below one, I see.
• 15:41
  We're just going to sort of do some measures to kind of prevent hospital systems from being
• 15:46
  overwhelmed, but we're not really going to solve this problem.
• 15:48
  Right.
• 15:49
  We're just going to make the Hulk a little bit angry.
• 15:50
  Yeah.
• 15:51
  It doesn't want to make him very angry.
• 15:52
  Yeah.
• 15:53
  No, once the Hulk is, once the genie's out of the bottle, it's out of the bottle.
• 15:56
  You need to get it below one.
• 15:57
  You need to say something here, Stephen, about the experience of Australia for people
• 16:02
  who weren't in Australia during the pandemic.
• 16:05
  There is a widely held perception that we endured lengthier and more intense lockdowns
• 16:14
  than elsewhere in the world.
• 16:15
  Yes.
• 16:16
  Even I have been in error in believing that Melbourne's lockdown was the longest in the
• 16:23
  world or something, or not the longest in the world.
• 16:29
  Explain to people how the different states basically experience the years of 2020 to 2022.
• 16:37
  It's the end of 2021.
• 16:38
  You know, first thing I would say is, I'm not going to diminish someone's experience for
• 16:41
  being in a lockdown and all of the negative consequences it had.
• 16:46
  Like that's real, which shouldn't pretend it's not real.
• 16:48
  And the government should be thinking about that as part of its decision making process.
• 16:54
  Two things.
• 16:55
  Start with the UK, right?
• 16:56
  What you said before about flattening it, we were saying flatten the curve.
• 17:00
  That shows you that, so there's a self lockdown, there's all these negative consequences.
• 17:05
  We also have to imagine what governments' incentives are.
• 17:09
  Well, governments kind of constraints are, right?
• 17:11
  Which is, you might like the letter of strategy, but no government's ever going to tolerate
• 17:15
  that.
• 17:16
  Like at some point, the government's going to realize the consequences of that are so
• 17:20
  heavy that we're going to have to intervene and try and pull the brakes on.
• 17:24
  And then in terms of people's outrage about having loved ones dying and the hospitals
• 17:28
  are slowing down.
• 17:29
  Yeah.
• 17:30
  The hospitals are the ones that would come from people being furious about, like a line
• 17:33
  up of ambulances at the hospital is just not tolerable.
• 17:38
  I mean, no government is having a period of time.
• 17:40
  Yeah.
• 17:41
  I mean, it's not right.
• 17:42
  And in Australia, people who aren't in Australia ought to understand that Australia is
• 17:46
  a country that I would say among the countries of the world is one that values order quite
• 17:52
  highly.
• 17:53
  Yes.
• 17:54
  We don't like a lot of chaos.
• 17:57
  We love a rule.
• 17:58
  Aussies love a rule.
• 17:59
  Yeah.
• 18:00
  So we like impersonal authority.
• 18:03
  You know, if a, if a, if somebody tells me what to do, can I swear on this?
• 18:08
  Yeah.
• 18:09
  Can I swear?
• 18:10
  If someone tells me what to do, we say get fucked, right?
• 18:12
  But if you write it on a sign.
• 18:14
  That is a great distinction that I haven't heard before, Stephen, that I've never thought
• 18:18
  up.
• 18:19
  But you're putting your finger on something that I haven't quite been able to articulate.
• 18:21
  Right.
• 18:22
  But it's so true.
• 18:23
  We do have this anti-authoritarian, rugged, individualistic ethos.
• 18:27
  When it's coming out of someone's mouth.
• 18:28
  When it's coming out of a human.
• 18:30
  Yeah.
• 18:31
  If you just write the same word on a sign.
• 18:33
  If you just write the same word on a sign.
• 18:34
  That's right.
• 18:35
  We'll obey the sign.
• 18:36
  Absolutely.
• 18:37
  So, you know, so I would, but in general, I think Australians like order.
• 18:38
  It's like we have this big, we have a lot of controversy over the immigration program and
• 18:42
  the kind of, you know, bow people, refugees, asylum seekers issue.
• 18:48
  And that's because people perceive chaos.
• 18:51
  They perceive it.
• 18:52
  Nobody likes disorder on that particular issue.
• 18:54
  No, but I think I always try on the issues.
• 18:55
  I think I always try on the issues.
• 18:56
  Yeah, sure.
• 18:57
  And all of that.
• 18:58
  Now, I think Australia as a country is just culturally or in terms of our preferences
• 19:03
  in general kind of disposed to want more order and more kind of, we don't want the chaos.
• 19:09
  So I think in Australia, governments had a pretty low threshold for what they were willing
• 19:14
  to tolerate on that.
• 19:15
  Yeah.
• 19:16
  And that kind of explains why, so early in the process, they were able to get on board.
• 19:20
  Back on what I'm trying to get other people non-Australian to understand is actually
• 19:25
  out of free.
• 19:26
  Yeah, yeah, no.
• 19:27
  Out of lockdown.
• 19:28
  But I wanted to just, we were for a long time.
• 19:32
  I understand that, you know, there is a background to why we did what we did and the way
• 19:38
  we did it.
• 19:39
  That is specific to Australia to some degree.
• 19:41
  Yeah.
• 19:42
  The second thing to say is, look, the OECD publishes statistics on school closures.
• 19:51
  They did a big exercise to collect from all the countries how many days of school people
• 19:55
  lost during COVID.
• 19:56
  So they measured all the way through to March 2021, how many school closures, how many
• 20:01
  days lost due to the COVID lockdowns there were.
• 20:05
  Now I was, I have to be honest, shocked when I looked this up for the book, but Melbourne's
• 20:10
  school closures were right on the OECD average.
• 20:13
  Wait, March 2021 is too early to be fair, because it was the, it was the southern winter
• 20:19
  of 2021 that we had the huge Delta lockdowns.
• 20:21
  That's the second, that's the second part of the story, okay.
• 20:27
  But let's just go with, in the initial year, one year, one year in, right, which was
• 20:32
  a long way into that.
• 20:33
  Yeah, but the critics of Australia's response say, well, yeah, that just means that you
• 20:36
  pushed back the reckoning that everyone has to have the bill will fall due, and ours
• 20:41
  just fell due in the winter of 2021.
• 20:43
  It's that, let's put a pin in that for a sec, okay.
• 20:46
  So let's just look at the first year.
• 20:48
  Over the first year, Melbourne's days lost due to lockdowns of in person instruction at
• 20:53
  school were like bang on the OECD average.
• 20:57
  Right.
• 20:58
  These were among the lowest in the OECD, lower than the Netherlands, lower than Sweden,
• 21:02
  lower than Finland, like lower than almost everybody.
• 21:06
  So there is a perception that Australia was locked down for the whole time.
• 21:08
  And those are the two worst cities, I mean, if you were in Perth, for example, there
• 21:12
  was no single day.
• 21:13
  Or Brisbane, none.
• 21:14
  Yeah.
• 21:15
  I was, we were in, we moved back to Australia during March 2020, because we thought, we
• 21:20
  don't want to be in Washington when this is going down.
• 21:23
  And my daughter, we were in Queensland, and she never missed a single week of in person
• 21:27
  instruction for the entire pandemic, right?
• 21:29
  And just to clarify for people, if they're wondering how it was possible, we closed the
• 21:32
  border completely, the external border.
• 21:35
  Nobody was allowed to come back in unless they spent two weeks in a quarantine hotel.
• 21:40
  And then there was contact tracing and so on, once people started moving around.
• 21:44
  But basically within four to five weeks of the, of the outbreak and unlocking the border,
• 21:50
  we were, there was no COVID.
• 21:52
  It was by, there was no community spread of coronavirus.
• 21:55
  It was by May, we basically eliminated the virus.
• 21:59
  Right.
• 22:00
  And when I say eliminated, I mean, zero cases or low single digit case numbers.
• 22:04
  Yes.
• 22:05
  Right.
• 22:06
  And for those case numbers, we're taking place in quarantine hotels and hospitals and
• 22:09
  things.
• 22:10
  Yeah.
• 22:11
  They weren't taking place from people from someone wandering around and coughing on people
• 22:13
  at a cafe.
• 22:14
  And if there were local breakouts, we would isolate them, do contact tracing.
• 22:20
  And when cases are that low, you can do that stuff.
• 22:23
  You can do the, and we had an army of people doing conducting contact tracing on behalf
• 22:27
  of the public health.
• 22:28
  Yes.
• 22:29
  Another thing that Americans probably wouldn't tolerate scanning a QR code on your phone
• 22:33
  before entering every, every single place so that then when you go and get your test
• 22:36
  and it turns out that you have it, the authorities can backtrack every single place that you've
• 22:41
  been to and contact all of the people who also checked in there within, you know, one
• 22:44
  hour of, when you were there or whatever it is.
• 22:47
  Yes.
• 22:48
  So that being said, we basically experienced most Australians in most places.
• 22:52
  Yes.
• 22:53
  It was a freer and less, certainly less chaotic, yes.
• 22:58
  And less stressful and less locked down pandemic than other countries.
• 23:05
  Even before you start talking about the fact that it cost us less money and killed something
• 23:11
  like 90% fewer people per capita than the United States, of course, of course per capita.
• 23:16
  Of course per capita.
• 23:17
  But if there's number is so small, yeah, I mean, you tell, yeah, it's crazy.
• 23:23
  So now let me pick on some pick up on something you just said, which is really important.
• 23:26
  You said, you said, you got to look at after March, 2021, absolutely.
• 23:32
  This brings me to the subject about which you are most furious in your book.
• 23:35
  Yes.
• 23:36
  I know where you're going here.
• 23:37
  Most furious bringing on, you know, I remember a mate said to me in December 2020, what
• 23:47
  are we doing about vaccines?
• 23:49
  You know, they're vaccinating people in Britain.
• 23:51
  They're starting now, they're jabbing people in December 2020.
• 23:56
  And I was thinking, yeah, what is happening?
• 23:58
  And so I started to kind of look into it and, and it was kind of evident that by that
• 24:03
  time to a significant degree, Australia had kind of missed the boat when it came to procuring
• 24:10
  sufficient quantities of a diverse portfolio of vaccines.
• 24:16
  And so other countries were rolling out vaccines.
• 24:19
  I mean, Israel was like, Israel had had enough fives of vaccines for the entire population.
• 24:25
  And they were rolling them out on mass in like January 2021, right?
• 24:29
  It was like, they were like the world leader, but even the US was like really ramping up
• 24:34
  very rapidly.
• 24:35
  Australia was six months behind, right?
• 24:38
  And just to clarify for people, there was no domestic production capacity for mRNA vaccines.
• 24:43
  That's now being changed.
• 24:44
  We're developing that and that should be online within the next 12 months or something
• 24:47
  right for the next pandemic, but at the time, we were essentially reliant on imports
• 24:53
  with the exception of one vaccine.
• 24:57
  So we backed this UQ vaccine, so the University of Queensland vaccine, which was locally produced.
• 25:04
  Australia has some significant kind of advantages in vaccine development, like Gardesill,
• 25:10
  which is the cervical cancer vaccine, which is, you know, basically solved several cancer
• 25:15
  for all women in the world ever.
• 25:18
  It's like one of the best things that humanity has achieved in the last 20 years.
• 25:23
  That came from the University of Queensland, right?
• 25:25
  So there's a reason to believe maybe we had some advantages to the kind of vaccine development
• 25:31
  in the end.
• 25:32
  It didn't work and it would give people false positive HIV test results, right?
• 25:36
  So it was like very quickly what did the UQ vaccine, the UQ coronavirus vaccine, exactly.
• 25:43
  The vaccine that we had put as like a hope, like the locally developed one, very early,
• 25:48
  it never made it through the development process because of this issue.
• 25:51
  Okay.
• 25:52
  So then the backup was AstraZeneca, right, which was developed at Oxford University and we
• 26:00
  could manufacture it in Melbourne with the facilities that we had at CSL.
• 26:05
  And so that was kind of it was really, it was a sort of collaboration between, or on the
• 26:09
  license, was it from, yeah, exactly from, so CSL,
• 26:12
  the University, exactly, licensed it out, make it here.
• 26:15
  And the government thought that'd be fine.
• 26:18
  Yeah.
• 26:19
  We'll just do that.
• 26:20
  That'll be fine.
• 26:21
  And so in addition, I think they ordered five million doses of Pfizer vaccine.
• 26:27
  And obviously Australia has a population of 25 million.
• 26:29
  So you need 50 million doses, because you need two.
• 26:32
  Double tax.
• 26:33
  Right.
• 26:34
  So five million is only enough for 10% of the population.
• 26:36
  It's like almost, almost pointless, right?
• 26:39
  On the other hand, and this is important for me to understand is in mid 2020, the US had
• 26:47
  this extraordinary thing, easily the best achievement of the Trump administration called
• 26:51
  Operation Warp Speed, which recognized the challenge of the pandemic very early on.
• 26:59
  I mean, it was the first few months, which was we, there are like eight candidate vaccines.
• 27:05
  We don't know which one's going to work.
• 27:08
  Let's just back them all, right?
• 27:10
  And we're going to give them money early.
• 27:12
  I see.
• 27:13
  So Operation Warp Speed was throw a bunch of public money at all of the possible drugs and
• 27:19
  build the factories.
• 27:20
  Build the factories.
• 27:21
  Build the factories.
• 27:22
  We don't care what's going to work and what's going to work.
• 27:23
  If it fails, it fails.
• 27:24
  Whatever.
• 27:25
  Right.
• 27:26
  The point is that Alex Tabarok, I don't know if you know Alex, he writes for a blog called
• 27:29
  marginal revolution.
• 27:30
  Oh, yes, of course.
• 27:31
  The world's easiest cost benefit analysis because you're dealing with orders of magnitude.
• 27:36
  Yes.
• 27:37
  Right.
• 27:38
  The benefits are 10, 100, 1000 times as high as the costs in that world.
• 27:44
  You should be willing to long story short.
• 27:46
  I don't want to dwell on Australia's vaccine screw ups because they don't teach us a huge
• 27:50
  amount apart from, well, don't do that again.
• 27:54
  But basically the Australian government was penny pinching and haggling and just, you
• 27:59
  know, there's all kinds of reports from inside Pfizer that they asked for a meeting with
• 28:03
  the health minister, Greg Hunt, you know, in the middle of 2020 and it took, you know,
• 28:08
  the government seven weeks to get back to them or something and then the government
• 28:12
  sent a low level, you know, functionary in the department which Pfizer considered to
• 28:17
  be a snub and was haggling over money and they were like, all right, we don't need to
• 28:20
  sell your vaccines.
• 28:21
  We've got a bunch of other buyers that we can sell it to and at the same time countries
• 28:26
  like Canada were buying up five or six times the amount that they needed.
• 28:29
  We should have just bought a shitton and then all of them.
• 28:32
  Yeah.
• 28:33
  And then if it worked great and if it didn't and if we had too many, just send them to
• 28:36
  the Pacific, just hand them out to Samoa and Tonga and VG and we look like great, like
• 28:42
  the good guys.
• 28:43
  So I don't know why it happened, whether it's complacency or incompetence or whatever,
• 28:47
  but it happened and as a result, you know, you just look at the vaccine roll act curves
• 28:52
  of various countries which we put in the book and Australia was literally six months
• 28:55
  behind.
• 28:56
  If we had vaccinated like Israel, Delta never would have happened or Delta never would
• 29:04
  have had the Delta wave, right, which precipitated this post March 2021 wave of lockdowns in Australia.
• 29:13
  That all happened in sort of June, if I remember correctly, if we had rolled out the vaccines
• 29:17
  in the first half of 2021, we would have just been where we ended up being at the end
• 29:22
  of 2021, right, which was ready to open up.
• 29:25
  Our strategy was never to stay under the doona or under that whatever, that's a comfort
• 29:33
  I think it would say forever.
• 29:36
  It was we are going to maintain this R less than one strategy so long as we aren't vaccinated
• 29:43
  and when we're vaccinated, we're going to live our life again like this is the flu.
• 29:47
  Yeah.
• 29:48
  Because now it basically is.
• 29:49
  Yeah.
• 29:50
  If you were vaccinated.
• 29:51
  Now what do you say to people who say, well, that's all very well if you've been vaccinated
• 29:54
  within the past two months, so that makes sense, you know, you all get vaccinated, then
• 29:57
  you all catch it.
• 29:58
  Right.
• 29:59
  Well, what did you do?
• 30:00
  You don't get, you don't get hospitalized and you don't die at the same rates.
• 30:04
  But what we were told when the vaccines were being rolled out was that there's a massive
• 30:11
  externality to not getting vaccinated, which is that you're going to kill grandma because
• 30:17
  the vaccines will stop you from transmitting the virus.
• 30:19
  And so as a collective problem, as like a public health question, we were sold a bill
• 30:24
  of goods.
• 30:25
  So goes that, you know, the libertarian thinking on this, which was do your part and get vaccinated
• 30:30
  for other people.
• 30:31
  But it actually turns out that transmission was not really affected the way that we thought
• 30:35
  that it was going to be by vaccination.
• 30:37
  Yeah.
• 30:38
  One people, be careful how you interpret the numbers.
• 30:42
  Like I know what you're saying, be careful how you interpret the numbers.
• 30:45
  So when they do a study on vaccines, they look at like mortality.
• 30:48
  So how much does it affect your probability of death?
• 30:51
  That goes down by like 90%, right?
• 30:53
  I mean, it's hugely beneficial to you individually.
• 30:56
  And that early on there was a suggestion that it also reduces the probability that you
• 31:01
  pass it to somebody else, right?
• 31:04
  And what you're saying is that probability ended up being a lot lower than we thought.
• 31:07
  Well, I mean, I would go further than that and say that there were some people and some
• 31:12
  people in misremembering that Fauci or the Australian government said this, which I don't
• 31:18
  think they did.
• 31:19
  But certainly Rachel Maddow said it on MSBC saying, if you get vaccinated, the virus stops
• 31:24
  with you.
• 31:25
  Yeah.
• 31:26
  Well, that's clearly not correct.
• 31:27
  I mean, even at the time I knew that wasn't correct because that's generally not how
• 31:31
  vaccines work.
• 31:32
  Yes.
• 31:33
  But there was an expectation, a lot of other vaccines for respiratory diseases as I understand
• 31:37
  it are better like impede transmission better than the COVID vaccines.
• 31:43
  Now, be careful, it does affect transmission at a social level.
• 31:53
  So in other words, it is the case that you are less likely to get COVID if you have the
• 32:01
  vaccine.
• 32:02
  And therefore, you are less likely to pass it on, you understand?
• 32:06
  So if you have COVID, if I get a COVID for sure, and I'm vaccinated, I'm no less likely
• 32:13
  to pass it on.
• 32:14
  Right?
• 32:15
  I see.
• 32:16
  But if I don't get it at the first place, I can't pass it on.
• 32:18
  Right.
• 32:19
  But is it true that the vaccine makes you less likely to quote unquote get it if we're defining
• 32:24
  get it as just having the virus warming around in your system?
• 32:27
  Yes.
• 32:28
  I mean, you'll ingest the virus and it won't take off in your system, right?
• 32:32
  And become infectious.
• 32:33
  Yes.
• 32:34
  I see.
• 32:35
  That's my common sense, retort to the position that I've just articulated, which is the easiest
• 32:40
  way that viruses get transmitted is by people sniffling and sneezing and coughing and
• 32:47
  like touching their eyes and then touching other things.
• 32:49
  And that sort of thing.
• 32:50
  It depends whether you're talking about the transmission conditional on having the disease
• 32:55
  or the unconditional transmission probability.
• 32:58
  Unconditionally, it's lower.
• 32:59
  Of course it is because you don't know you're going to get the disease in the first place.
• 33:03
  So I think, anyway, the bottom line is there is definitely a social case for ensuring
• 33:09
  people have vaccination.
• 33:11
  We can argue about how strong that case is.
• 33:13
  We can argue about.
• 33:14
  Well, let's argue about that because people are arguing about that and when at the next
• 33:18
  pandemic, this will be the locus of concern, right?
• 33:21
  So things like, let's just talk about vaccine mandates, for example, I think it's a pretty
• 33:27
  easy case to make that if you're a government employed doctor, for example, working in a
• 33:31
  hospital during a pandemic, you have to be vaccinated because you're coming into contact
• 33:35
  with lots of, or if you're an aged care worker, right?
• 33:38
  But take the Canadian truckers, which is something that you hear a lot about, right?
• 33:41
  You know, should it be a requirement for a truck driver to be vaccinated in order to be
• 33:48
  able to do their job and make a living?
• 33:50
  Right.
• 33:51
  How do you, as an economist, measure the trade offs of that?
• 33:53
  Yeah.
• 33:54
  So the first thing is obviously we're not going to pin someone down and force them to take
• 33:57
  a vaccine.
• 33:58
  That's never going to happen in, certainly in Australia.
• 34:01
  The question is what, but we have tools as a government to put penalties on people
• 34:06
  for not doing it, right?
• 34:07
  So we can incentivize it or we can punish.
• 34:10
  Yeah, you can ruin their life.
• 34:11
  You can make it impossible to get a job, leave the country, enter a bar.
• 34:14
  And to some degree, we did that.
• 34:16
  And there were a bunch of people in Australia who left their job because they didn't want
• 34:20
  to be vaccinated.
• 34:21
  And I think we have to think carefully about that, right?
• 34:24
  Now, I would say in Australia, we got to an extraordinarily high rate of vaccination
• 34:32
  in excess of 90 percent, right?
• 34:34
  In Australia, we even, like delayed, right, six months later than we should have.
• 34:39
  But in the end, we got there.
• 34:40
  So I don't think Australia had a big issue in general with kind of vaccine skepticism,
• 34:45
  but we did have a lot of incentives to get to that.
• 34:48
  Yeah.
• 34:49
  And for a long time afterwards, it was intolerable.
• 34:51
  I mean, you couldn't come into the country for ages.
• 34:54
  I mean, I think it was more than a year that you couldn't come back into Australia
• 34:57
  if you weren't even after the pandemic was well and truly over.
• 35:00
  Yes.
• 35:01
  And we were still saying that you had to have this slip of paper in order to come in.
• 35:04
  And we do that with other vaccines.
• 35:06
  So children's immunizations in Australia are extremely highly incentivized to the point
• 35:11
  where if you don't get your kid of vaccination, you'll lose sort of government benefits,
• 35:16
  right?
• 35:17
  Can't they not go to primary school?
• 35:18
  Yeah.
• 35:19
  And that's true in the US.
• 35:20
  You know, where I am in the US, my daughters have to be vaccinated and the school makes
• 35:24
  us prove it, right?
• 35:25
  Yeah.
• 35:26
  So it's not like vaccine mandates are a purely Australian thing.
• 35:30
  But I would say, well, we need to consider the social benefits.
• 35:33
  And we need to consider the harm to people, right?
• 35:35
  And in my view, I mean, there's a philosophical question there, right?
• 35:39
  There's no kind of objectively correct answer to this question, which is, yeah, I don't
• 35:44
  care what people want to do.
• 35:45
  Let's force them to do it because it's what's in the interest of society.
• 35:49
  So there's some cost we have to take into account, right?
• 35:53
  And I agree with you that if it turns out that the vaccine is not as socially beneficial
• 35:58
  and it's, you know, prevention of spread, then that will mean maybe we want to temper
• 36:02
  some of those measures, right, and not be so hard line about it.
• 36:06
  And I think in the next pandemic, we have to be a little bit more thoughtful about some
• 36:13
  of these trade-offs, right?
• 36:15
  In the space of our less than one about what we think is worthwhile and maybe what we
• 36:20
  didn't do right.
• 36:21
  So, you know, again, I don't have a precise answer to the question, but I think that, again,
• 36:27
  like everything else, it's a cost-benefit analysis at a social level.
• 36:30
  You know, what are we willing to tolerate as a people and what is it costing us and what
• 36:34
  do we get out of it?
• 36:35
  In my mind, looking back, I'm pretty comfortable with what we did in vaccinations, but I'm also
• 36:39
  like a pro-vax person.
• 36:40
  Yeah, look, I mean, some people don't regard it as purely a cost-benefit analysis for
• 36:44
  the same reasons that some people are not just purely utilitarians, right?
• 36:48
  I mean, they think they're a, I mean, I'm sympathetic to this view that they're a human
• 36:52
  rights concerns.
• 36:53
  Yes.
• 36:54
  Like, if I could tell you that the cost-benefit analysis comes out in favor of me, like
• 36:58
  taking you and locking you up in the Northern Territory in a concentration camp and depriving
• 37:03
  you of your freedom, but by making an example of you, it's going to increase compliance and
• 37:07
  then everybody else is going to be better off on net.
• 37:10
  It's just not good enough.
• 37:11
  Yes.
• 37:12
  We don't use cost-benefit analyses like that.
• 37:13
  You have fundamental human rights that can't be.
• 37:16
  But then we revert to the previous conversation, which is the person who you pass it on to
• 37:21
  also has rights, right?
• 37:25
  And if, because you're less likely to get it when you're vaccinated, you make it less
• 37:30
  likely for that other person to get it, well, those people have rights too, right?
• 37:34
  And so that means they have a right, if not to be infected.
• 37:37
  Not really.
• 37:38
  Not really.
• 37:39
  No, they have a right, if they're hypercautious about not catching a disease during
• 37:43
  a pandemic, to stay away from people like you.
• 37:46
  But they don't have a right to force you to do, to jump through the hoops, to keep
• 37:51
  that, to keep their air just to clear it clean and pure from diseases.
• 37:55
  Do you know about the coast theorem?
• 37:56
  Do you know about coast?
• 37:57
  No, no.
• 37:58
  In economics, Ronald coast was a famous economist.
• 38:01
  He had this idea of the coast theorem, which is in order for these exact situations where
• 38:07
  there are what we call economists, we call externalities, where one person is harming
• 38:11
  another, or one person is benefiting another.
• 38:14
  We get these situations in economics where we don't get like an efficient outcome, right?
• 38:18
  So we see them a lot, climate change, you know, emissions, you know, you, you, pollution,
• 38:25
  you know, you have vaccines or a great example, right?
• 38:30
  Lots of examples where you're imposing costs on other people.
• 38:32
  Coast said, all you have to do, you don't have to regulate, you don't have to intervene.
• 38:36
  What you have to do is impose the property rights on one of the parties.
• 38:41
  In other words, the example I use in my class, what I'm teaching it to my students is,
• 38:45
  you're at a concert.
• 38:47
  There's these people in front of you and they stand up and you're the kind of person
• 38:50
  who doesn't like to stand up.
• 38:51
  You like to sit down at concerts.
• 38:53
  They stand up in front of you.
• 38:55
  You want to say to them, sit down, right?
• 38:59
  And you can say, well, they don't want to sit down, right?
• 39:04
  They're imposing an externality on you because you can't see, well, if they had to sit
• 39:08
  down, you'd be imposing an externality on them because they can't stand.
• 39:11
  There's no, you know, there's, there's no God here to say who's right.
• 39:16
  You're, you're both fighting over a finite resource, right?
• 39:21
  And we have to give it to one of you.
• 39:24
  And economists who say we need to impose the property rights, pick one, have it be you
• 39:28
  have a right to see or have it be there, they have a right to stand and then let the
• 39:33
  two parties trade.
• 39:35
  If I want them to sit down, I got to pay them.
• 39:38
  And if they want to dance or if they want to dance, they have to pay me.
• 39:41
  I see.
• 39:42
  Right?
• 39:43
  Yeah.
• 39:44
  Either way, somebody has to have the right.
• 39:46
  We're not going to make a moral judgment about who deserves the right, but we're going
• 39:50
  to make a judgment about who has it and then let the market work, right?
• 39:53
  So the idea behind vaccines is to say, well, we have to kind of pick, right?
• 39:58
  Who has the right?
• 39:59
  Who has the right to be free from infection or does someone have a right not to take a
• 40:04
  vaccine?
• 40:05
  But whichever way we go, yeah, I mean, I guess it's messy because you're, because you
• 40:10
  are, you being vaccinated doesn't mean that I don't get infected.
• 40:13
  It just makes it less likely to be a situation where you're a person and you go to the shops
• 40:18
  and you literally breathe in the thing that, and that like they caused you to get the
• 40:22
  disease, right?
• 40:23
  Yes.
• 40:24
  So I don't know if there's a, I think it's hard to say one person is right or wrong.
• 40:28
  So I mean, let's say we just need to come up with a situation where the good outcome
• 40:32
  happens.
• 40:33
  Right.
• 40:34
  Right.
• 40:35
  So we can't, so one idea, and this is what we took around in the book, I mean, there's
• 40:37
  vaccine mandates, but there's also incentives.
• 40:40
  So we can, you know, like codes would say, you just tax the thing.
• 40:44
  That's why we want carbon taxes because we just want the people who are emitting carbon
• 40:48
  to take into account the cost there, I mean, we did tax the thing just not financially
• 40:52
  right.
• 40:53
  No, but we tax, we tax people in the same way we could come up with a number for like
• 40:57
  the socially optimal, the, the, the social benefit of a vaccine.
• 41:00
  And we could have paid people.
• 41:01
  Right.
• 41:02
  We could have paid them to take the vaccine, right?
• 41:05
  We chose very, we chose a different path, which was to impose the property rights and
• 41:10
  then penalize people, like in other words, you, you have an obligation to get the vaccine.
• 41:14
  Yeah.
• 41:15
  Right.
• 41:16
  And if you don't do this, but you could flip it and you could give benefits.
• 41:18
  Exactly.
• 41:19
  Exactly.
• 41:20
  Exactly.
• 41:21
  Instead of banning the unvaccinated from going on holidays, you could give a free international
• 41:23
  holiday to everybody.
• 41:24
  Totally.
• 41:25
  I mean, there's a number.
• 41:26
  Yeah.
• 41:27
  But you know, and I would say the current government, the formal opposition, actually proposed
• 41:29
  to pay people.
• 41:30
  Do you remember that?
• 41:31
  Yeah.
• 41:32
  As the opposition, they said, let's pay people to vaccinate.
• 41:33
  And it's like the most economically sensible thing I've ever made.
• 41:36
  Although you make another point as an economist in the book, which is that actually there's
• 41:39
  this behavioral economics that comes into this, which is that once you start coding an act
• 41:44
  in people's mind as being, yeah, being doing it for the money, it actually reduces compliance
• 41:49
  probably because we're more motivated by our own sense of duty and feeling about ourselves
• 41:53
  than we are by a couple hundred bucks.
• 41:55
  But at the margin, at the margin, if you want more vaccination, you can incentivize it.
• 42:00
  Yeah.
• 42:01
  Right.
• 42:02
  We don't have to use that.
• 42:03
  Let me just get to another thing where it's, there's this kind of tricky trade off
• 42:05
  about externalities, which is essentially locking people up, right?
• 42:09
  So quarantine, I think the, the idea of locking people up who are choosing to be locked
• 42:15
  up because they want to come into the country is perfectly legitimate.
• 42:19
  But there were cases of, you know, outback communities where people couldn't self-isolate
• 42:24
  or were unwilling to self-isolate, especially in indigenous communities.
• 42:27
  Right.
• 42:28
  And so the police would come and they would take people and put them into quarantine camps
• 42:34
  for two weeks against their will.
• 42:36
  Right.
• 42:37
  You're essentially incarcerating innocent people who refuse to abide by a stay-at-home order
• 42:43
  in the interests of public health rule.
• 42:46
  Yes.
• 42:47
  Similarly, you couldn't leave the country.
• 42:50
  Yes, I remember.
• 42:51
  Yeah.
• 42:52
  I'm sure you do.
• 42:53
  My collage was here.
• 42:54
  When there was a particularly nasty delta outbreak in India, there were a lot of Australians
• 43:00
  living in India and they couldn't come back to Australia at all.
• 43:04
  There was a ban on Australians returning from India at the same time because of the
• 43:08
  hotel, the quarantine hotel capacity being limited, the government would just summarily
• 43:14
  issue to airlines the number of passengers that they're allowed to bring into the country
• 43:18
  on any given day and the airlines would bump 95% of all the passengers on each flight except
• 43:24
  for the 5% most lucrative ones.
• 43:26
  So people like my brother, trying to come back from the UK, would have to basically re-mortage
• 43:31
  their house to spend $30,000 on business class, full-fair business class tickets for their
• 43:36
  family to come back so they wouldn't get bumped.
• 43:38
  So these are all extreme in positions on the movement and freedom of people in the interests
• 43:46
  of, I suppose, keeping R.
• 43:48
  Yes.
• 43:49
  Under one.
• 43:50
  At what point does one start rethinking them and going, well, that would be too much?
• 43:54
  Right.
• 43:55
  So let me tell you, the Indian thing is the single worst thing, I think, in the pandemic.
• 43:59
  We don't talk about it on the book, I would say, and we had, there was only so many things
• 44:05
  that we could talk about.
• 44:06
  We allude to it in one place.
• 44:09
  And we said that it's something that shouldn't happen, right?
• 44:12
  There are certain, I mean, I live in the US.
• 44:15
  There are certain inalienable rights that people have, and I believe, you know, there
• 44:21
  are certainly things that are beyond this cost-benefit ratio question, right?
• 44:25
  Which is there are, there is something that, like, if you're an Australian and you want
• 44:30
  to come into the country, you should have the right to do that.
• 44:32
  Yeah.
• 44:33
  If you're a citizen, you get, it's your country.
• 44:34
  And it belongs to you.
• 44:35
  That's literally it's your endowment, you are Australian, right?
• 44:39
  So that's a good example of something that I think, the fact that we literally would
• 44:45
  not permit Australians to enter the country from that, I think is deeply immoral, right?
• 44:50
  And I think that's a situation where you say, whatever I is who cares, we're not going
• 44:55
  to do that, right?
• 44:57
  But I would say, so there are some situations like that, and we can point to lots of them.
• 45:03
  Again, like the crazy way we dealt with certain people doing things that were totally benign,
• 45:08
  and we treated them very harshly as well.
• 45:09
  Like what?
• 45:10
  Well, just the whole thing we're saying, like, yeah, like the Northern Territory, or like
• 45:13
  some kid in a park, or like whatever, I mean, there's some posts on Facebook about how
• 45:17
  they want to organize, you know, a protest rally in the police come out.
• 45:21
  So we have a lot of like, we need to have a lot of reflection about what we did and how
• 45:26
  beneficial it was and maybe whether across some lines.
• 45:30
  But here's what I would say, a lot of these issues can be solved with more competent management
• 45:34
  by governments, right?
• 45:36
  So, you know, we stuck with hotel quarantine for the whole time.
• 45:41
  We literally put infected people into hotels.
• 45:45
  And a hotel is not an environment that is well designed to like contain a virus.
• 45:49
  Every leak, every breakout in Australia happened because of a leak in hotel quarantine
• 45:52
  in some way or another, right?
• 45:53
  I mean, hotels are ordinary buildings built usually right in the middle of the busiest
• 45:58
  parts of the country.
• 45:59
  With lots of ventilation parts.
• 46:00
  Lots of things.
• 46:01
  Lots of things.
• 46:02
  Like a cruise ship, but not on the water, right?
• 46:04
  And so I, you know, the fact that we didn't very early on in the pandemic go actually let's
• 46:09
  just build some damn hotel quarantine facilities, temporary buildings, like make them cheap,
• 46:13
  make them whatever.
• 46:14
  Let's do it.
• 46:15
  Let's actually build that capacity.
• 46:16
  There was that conversation.
• 46:17
  I remember arguing for it on the air on my radio, but there was also again a libertarian,
• 46:23
  I don't even want to call it libertarian.
• 46:24
  There was a, I think, not unreasonable concern that the government shouldn't be in the business
• 46:30
  of building concentration camps for its citizens, even really nice ones.
• 46:35
  I don't know.
• 46:36
  I would just say if we had had sufficient hotel quarantine capacity that it was effective,
• 46:43
  we wouldn't have needed to deny entry to the people who were in India.
• 46:46
  I don't mean that.
• 46:47
  I guess it's our trade-offs.
• 46:48
  I mean, in a, I think we should probably just build a whole bunch of quarantine facilities
• 46:54
  on the outskirts of the big cities, because we know that we, we know they will be not
• 46:57
  a big pandemic and we may need it and hopefully we don't need it.
• 47:01
  But it's one of those things where if you get to the position at which you do need it,
• 47:06
  you want to have made the decisions now that you don't want a tool of not made.
• 47:09
  Absolutely.
• 47:10
  It's good insurance policy.
• 47:11
  It's good insurance policy.
• 47:12
  It's like the vaccines.
• 47:13
  Yeah.
• 47:14
  So I would just say, look, there are some things that clearly we did badly and there are
• 47:17
  some things that clearly overstepped the line, but we also ought to think were there alternatives
• 47:22
  which would have generated the same outcome at much lower cost.
• 47:26
  And I think that's, and I guess the point of your book is really just to clarify, because
• 47:31
  the economics and the health outcomes both flourish when R is less than one, the whole
• 47:37
  conversation should just be, is this the optimal tool to achieve R less than one with the
• 47:45
  fewest externalities?
• 47:46
  Yes.
• 47:47
  And if you do that, then you can say, okay, well, hotel quarantine isn't great because
• 47:50
  in a, you have to lock it so many more Australians out.
• 47:55
  It makes it harder for them to get home.
• 47:56
  And then you had the whole lockdowns which only came about because of hotel quarantine.
• 48:00
  Yes.
• 48:01
  It could have been avoided.
• 48:02
  We could have all been cavorting on the beach.
• 48:03
  Yes.
• 48:04
  For a full two years.
• 48:05
  Yes.
• 48:06
  And we didn't have, I, I think we didn't have enough conversations that were framed in
• 48:10
  that way.
• 48:11
  Right.
• 48:12
  I think if, if people understood, because the other thing we haven't talked about at all,
• 48:15
  and I think it's really important, is this whole thing, all of these measures being
• 48:20
  effect, like, okay, let's put it this way.
• 48:23
  You can evade as many taxes as you like, right?
• 48:27
  The government will audit you and there's some chance that you'll be caught, but you
• 48:32
  could get away with it, right?
• 48:34
  Most people don't do that.
• 48:36
  Do you think they do that because they're worried about being audited?
• 48:40
  Some people.
• 48:41
  But a lot of people do the right thing because they feel like it's the right thing to do,
• 48:44
  right?
• 48:45
  I mean, you could go and, you could walk out into the street and kill someone.
• 48:49
  Do you not kill someone because you worried you might go to jail?
• 48:51
  I mean, maybe, maybe it's just you don't want to kill someone.
• 48:53
  Well, I don't want to kill someone, but I do want to cheat on my taxes.
• 48:56
  Does that make me a bad person?
• 48:58
  But so much of society functions on voluntary action, like our willingness to just go with
• 49:06
  the flow, right?
• 49:07
  To do the right thing, to do the right thing, right?
• 49:11
  Australia went along with a lot of this stuff, but we really pushed them to their limit.
• 49:18
  And I think there's a significant degree to which if things had gone further, I think
• 49:23
  we would have lost people, right?
• 49:24
  And I think many cases got lost people, you mean the community wouldn't have stood for
• 49:29
  it?
• 49:30
  They just wouldn't have gone along with it.
• 49:31
  Yeah.
• 49:32
  And I think the reason we lifted restrictions when we did in the way we did them was
• 49:35
  because I think politicians realized that people weren't going to cooperate, especially
• 49:39
  the New South Wales Premier and the Prime Minister, right?
• 49:41
  They just said, and they're like, I think we've got it, we've got it, we've got just
• 49:43
  got it.
• 49:44
  Because you have to have people, you have to have public support.
• 49:45
  And I think the thing we need to think about is in the next, you know, if there's another
• 49:49
  pandemic, which, you know, not if it's a highly likely thing.
• 49:53
  Not if.
• 49:54
  No, we say when in the book, right?
• 49:55
  Right.
• 49:56
  It's a, it's a highly likely scenario.
• 49:58
  I think people will be a lot less willing to go along with it because they'll remember
• 50:01
  what happened last time.
• 50:02
  And so I think we've got a, we need to, and this is part of why we wrote the book, we
• 50:06
  need to do some hard thinking about what we did well and what we didn't do well.
• 50:10
  So that we just do a much better job next time because I'm not sure we're going to automatically
• 50:15
  have the buy-in that we had.
• 50:17
  Stephen, thank you for the book.
• 50:19
  It's a fabulous read.
• 50:20
  I highly recommend it.
• 50:21
  Thank you.