COVID Compendium...Don't blame Supply Chain.

Australia’s reputation as “The Lucky Country” has been bruised recently.

We’ve endured two disasters already this year, with the first already slipping from view. Australia’s 2019/2020 bush fire crisis saw whole swathes of the country including townships ablaze and more than one billion animals and organisms incinerated.

A hard act to follow, and yet, enter Covid-19…

Thankfully, we seem to have been remarkably fortunate, compared with colleagues’ accounts in the initial European epicentre and later the UK. Compared with these horrendous scenarios, we’ve done well and, so far, mostly dodged the Covid-19 bullet.

Sigh of relief; “Lucky Country” status intact – perhaps…

Global leadership styles

It’s been amusing, bizarre and, at times, almost surreal to observe various leadership styles from this corner of world.

Boastful Boris (UK PM Johnson) came out swinging early, announcing he was deliberately “shaking hands” all round with a reckless abandon, until he caught the bug himself, spent over a fortnight in hospital – including a trip to the ICU – and came frighteningly close to falling off the perch and throwing already tenuous British politics into complete disarray.

Suddenly the British government rediscovered its reverence for the NHS, although it remains to be seen how long this newfound affection will endure.

But Donald Trump has set the gold standard; effectively claiming Covid-19 was, basically, a political stunt or “hoax” being used by his adversaries. At that point (28 February) with no known US fatalities, it was predictable “spin” to simply dismiss it all with a hand wave and a few glib words.

We’ve all seen how well that turned out…

Contrast these with our near neighbour, New Zealand, and its PM, Jacinda Ardern. No battle cries, no great declarations of war and bellicose language or rallying the troops, no chest-beating or grandstanding.

Rather a simple, steadfast supportive style, inviting and entreating New Zealanders to co-operate and save the nation (quite literally).

“We are a team of five million” was the refrain, and Ardern subsequently gave a masterclass in crisis leadership and communication, and showed the rest of the world how it should be done – for the second time in as many years, actually…

And we have already seen the results of this, with NZ more or less open and back-in-business less than three months after the onset. There are other factors of course, New Zealand’s geographic isolation and comparatively smaller population clearly help, yet leadership has been pivotal.

All American

Meanwhile, the US has cemented its place as the new global pandemic epicentre, with cases and body count skyrocketing, and pretty soon they’ll have something else to export to the world – namely, a second wave.

One can never really be sure that the “Americanisation” of a home culture is complete, until one or preferably both of the following take place: first, losing 120,000 – mostly poor, minority or disadvantaged – lives during a pandemic in the richest and most powerful country on earth, really nails it! This is a feat that so far only America has been able to pull off. And one that ought to be investigated in the Hague under crimes against humanity (which, but for “American exceptionalism”, probably would be). Just a moment’s thought shows how utterly heinous and grotesque this crisis is and the supply chain has been topical in all of it, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Secondly, when you see somewhat rotund shoppers bashing each other in supermarket aisles for the last twin-pack of toilet paper, then you know the cultural takeover is almost complete.

Thankfully, we’ve been treated to just this second option down under, in spades, at various stages throughout the pandemic. Seems we’re nicely on our way to being All-American.

(Pic Source MarketWatch)

Funny, but in my more “doomsday prepper” moments, I always thought canned foods and the like would be must-haves, how wrong I was…

Life or death Economics

The false dichotomy that’s been “mainstreamed” and popularised, is exactly that – false. The idea that we save lives OR save the economy should never have taken hold in the first place, and must be immediately consigned to the dustbin forever.

It is no shock revelation that these are two sides of the same coin, as many “second-wave” countries are now figuring out. (Interestingly, a similar argument could be made for the environmental crisis, but that’s a discussion for another day). Contain and control the spread, and you can re-open the economy, but not the other way round.

What about supply chain?

Glad you asked. Supply Chain has come in for more than its fair share of criticism; there’s been a constant churn of headlines on “How Supply Chain has failed” and “What went wrong with Supply Chain?” throughout the pandemic.

These notions are totally misplaced.

Supply Chain has simply done what it has been told to do. We need to look deeper to find the causes of the dire shortages that tragically have cost tens of thousands of lives. And when we do, we see the fingerprints of unit economics everywhere.

The unit economics we’re speaking of are those of entrenched neo-liberalism, “The Chicago School”, spawned in no small part by the fêted Milton Friedman and foisted on the world simultaneously by Reagan and Thatcher in the eighties. After four decades of this cult of privatisation and free market fanaticism, it turns out that, as a society, we can no longer take care of ourselves.

Just-in-time and “cost down” may work beautifully for automobile manufacturing, but don’t work for people, and in fact make things far worse for health care and essential or emergency services.

We cannot rely upon corporate, private production which only occurs when there is market share and profit (Gilead Pharma's recent antics make the point better than I ever could). Some services, supplies and utilities simply cannot be measured in terms of “cost” or “profit” or conventional unit economics.

This “for profit only” approach leaves us exceedingly vulnerable and, sadly, it takes major disruption like a pandemic to bring this home.

Societies, communities and supply chains the world over need some kind of reserves, spare available capacity, built-in, to be able to withstand the ravages of global catastrophic events. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, this literally means spare or even surplus inventory, reserve resources in terms of labour (people) and production capability.

Decades ago, before the scourge of neo-liberalism, we had all these things. In fact, they went without saying; they were simply assumed to be part of the recipe for a functioning society.

Let’s not be too hasty to blame the supply chain for these tragic outcomes, but instead listen to the (so-called) forefather of modern capitalism himself, the great Adam Smith: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

This rarely read or quoted phrase goes a long way to explaining our current nightmare.

The Lucky Country’s charmed existence is once more hanging in the balance as we lurch into our third crisis: a semi-permanent state of extreme drought.

Pray for rain, in fact make it rain – dollars or droplets – we’ll take what we can get and continue to hope earnestly for ourselves and the rest of the global village that the affliction known as Covid-19 is vanquished quickly.