Life inside a hard lockdown, where diminishing returns meet the news cycle

Today, in hard lockdown in Sydney’s 12 local government areas “of concern”, we’re going to start discovering what happens when scolds on Facebook community groups are powered by media hot takes to overwhelm public policy.

We’re at the meta-message point of disease control — from messaging (Stay At Home!), to compliance (Police!) to message reinforcement to show it’s serious (Army! Big Fines!). Now authorities are messaging the messengers that they’re serious about being serious.

Law of diminishing returns, meet the 24-hour news cycle.

The decision to “throw everything” to force compliance at pandemic-struck south and western Sydney made headlines, although neither health officials nor, remarkably, the police seem to believe it will make any material difference to COVID spread.

It’s a win for media: easier to bang on about ever-harder lockdowns and compliance than it is to understand and explain the modern service economy where the 12 LGAs are the beating heart.

Fairly or unfairly, the entrenched view from the LGAs “of concern” is that beyond our borders compliance is largely theatre. Even the well-publicised police patrols at the eastern beaches seem more about keeping outsiders, well, out.

Inside the LGAs, the government seems to have crashed past the Pareto optimum: that point where you can no longer make things better — safer — for anyone without making things worse for others through harsher lockdowns.

The relentless media questioning at the daily press conferences is just hammering to keep the lid of that trap nailed shut — with 2.2 million of us inside.

Sure there’s plenty of support for a stronger lockdown. When Premier Gladys Berejiklian talks about “a handful of people doing the wrong thing”, she’s touching a raw nerve.

If you’ve spent any time in local Facebook groups in and around these local government areas, you’d know just about the most common questions are variations of “where are the police?“ Come across a post about an “illegal gathering” and loud voices chime in from someone who knows someone who was there. It’s a nightmare for administrators holding it all together. Some have thrown in the towel and banned all COVID-related discussions.

People are scared of infection, frustrated at how long it’s going on, sad about what they’re missing and will never get back. Is the lock-’em-up view the majority? Maybe. Is it an irresistible force? Apparently, for now.

It’s fragmenting trust and solidarity — within and between the two Sydneys. When too many in the media see it as their job to make the lockdown harder, it’s difficult to see what role it plays in putting things back together at the end.

First step is understanding. The 12 LGAs are different, not just in community diversity but in economics: they’re the country’s logistic and services funnel stretching out from its narrow mouth around the airport and Port Botany to the western edge of the city. Just about anything you buy in NSW (and plenty you’ll buy in other states) will have passed through one of the giant distribution centres sitting in that funnel.

Labour costs are kept down — largely outsourced with casuals provided by labour-hire companies.

This laser focus on logistic processes and labour costs has built the retail giants, big enough to see in the national accounts (in the United States, economists call it “the Walmart effect”). By bulking products and minimising journeys with just-in-time deliveries from producer to depot to store, they keep costs low, make competitors unviable and drive further monopolisation up the supply chain.

Even COVID gives them a competitive advantage. Their large multiple distribution centres are better equipped to meet COVID-safe demands and to implement the rapid antigen testing mandated as part of last week’s package.

It’s these economics — not lack of will or compliance — that makes suppressing Delta hard. Well-meaning calls to pay people to stay at home and less well-meaning calls for a “ring of steel” are equally unlikely to help.

The transmission that triggered this Delta outbreak occurred at the very mouth of the funnel, the point where Australia locks into the global economy around Botany Bay. The virus made a detour to Bondi, but it never left the service economy where it’s now entrenched, hard lockdown or no. Maybe it was always going to.