We must all play a role or pay a hefty price

“…Those of us who can are working from home. As our hearts break, we watch others who run our favourite shops make the devastating decision to close their doors. And for thousands who have been stood down from work we see them queue outside the offices of Centrelink in a modern version of those grainy black and white photos from the Depression that we thought only lived in the history books.

Yet social distancing is what we must do. It is the key measure that stands between our existing life in Geelong and the horrors we have seen in Milan and Madrid. These are modern cities with modern health systems in modern democracies like our own. And yet the break-down of their hospitals in the faceof the coronavirus onslaught has seen decisions made which challenge the basic assumptions of what it is to live in the developed world. People who had years left to live were being sent home to die without proper healthcare because the system simply could not cope. We cannot allow that to happen here.

This is serious. Abiding by the directions of government may not seem like a matter of life and death, but it is. Staying at home, other than for the four stipulated reasons, is a fundamental matter of civic duty. It is the right thing to do, and the decent thing to do for everyone working so tirelessly to get us through this pandemic…”