A wave of relief has apparently swept the country, after the federal budget unleashed a tsunami of cash. It’s prompted a huge jump in consumer confidence.
Data out today showed that public sentiment has surged to a three month high as researchers found most people thought the budget would improve their finances.
If you can believe it, people are now feeling more positive than they were before the Coronavirus hit.
That’s the bang you get for a trillion dollars of debt!
But it isn’t all good news.
We’ve also learned that more than a million Australians have sought mental health treatment during the pandemic.
This is the forgotten toll that government over-reaction to a virus has delivered.
In the struggle to save lives from Corona, governments have destroyed the health, wellbeing and businesses of many, many more.
It’s easy in hindsight to say what should have been done better but the warnings about the dodgy death modelling and over-reaction were made by some of us very early on.
Not surprisingly, it is Victoria that has led the real Covid-19 health crisis with more than 350,000 people seeking access to psychiatrists, psychologists and counselling treatments in the last two months alone.
Apparently young people are at the top of the list.
What makes this entire pandemic so frustrating is that young people are the ones largely unaffected by the disease itself, but they have been forced to bear the brunt of the crazy policy response.
Their job opportunities, studies, health and wellbeing have been severely impacted for next to no reason. Worse still is that they’ll also be picking up the tab for decades to come, because they’ll have to to repay the trillion dollar debt legacy that’s been created.
That highlights the real problem with what governments have done during this pandemic.
Long after corona becomes considered just another bad flu season, we’ll still be picking up the pieces from a busted budget and a broken generation .
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
The Prime Minister has a delicate balancing act ahead of him. He needs to muscle up to China while re-establishing important trade markets for our products.
