We’ll Pay in Pain When the Bill Comes Due

I was born in the Great Depression. “Depression Babies” they called us. Our parents were so proud. At the price of their own deprivations, they managed to rear us as healthy young Australians in a time of terrible hardship. I remember almost nothing. But as a toddler I saw able-bodied men, reduced to begging swaggies, coming to our door to ask for food. I found them frightening, but what really was frightening was invisible: they had lost control of their lives.

It is a great surprise to find that nearly 90 years later, I may well depart, not in the comfortable dotage I had saved all my life for, but in the next Depression. Unlike the ’30s, this one has been engineered by a government that succumbed to a panicky fear of death. It has sub-contracted its decision-making to panels of unelected doctors who have abandoned common sense in subservience to the cult of “modelling”. In short,  the 21^st century’s looming Depression has been artificially induced, not inherited….