7 March

I think the response to the bushfires was as dysfunctional as the response to Covid-19. Bushfire relief looked like people acting nobly, and Covid-19 looks like people acting selfishly and in panic. But they’re people acting in the same way. The $500 million raised for the bushfires is a much bigger mess than the disruption to toilet paper supply chains. Instead of focusing on the lack of coordination, we focus on the people, like true populist tabloid lemmings. We see heroes for the bushfires, and idiots for the toilet paper. In fact it’s just ordinary people doing ordinary things, in both cases, in the absence of any coordination. It’s the age of populism, and this is how it looks, coordination is seen as ‘bureaucracy’.