Show notes
KEY TOPICS AND TIME STAMPS
Zero: Why demography matters so much now
—Bernard talks how he trained as a teacher before realising it wasn’t for him and “stumbling” into demography, which has never been more relevant: it’s interpreting statistics such as births, deaths, incomes or the incidence of disease and how they illustrate the changing structure of human population. Basically, how and where we live.
—Asked by Sharon if he’s “more in demand than ever” Bernard says coronavirus has sparked “extraordinary interest” in social commentary around the “significant” event of a pandemic.
—Sharon asks how he can predict what the post corona-world will look like socially.
—Bernard says the scale and pace of coronavirus was “breathtaking” and “it does tend to change people.”
04:00 The “them and us” element, Hollywood and the ‘big nap’
—Sharon notes there is a ‘them and us’ element to coronavirus, with the virus as the ‘them’ and the planet as the ‘us.’ She feels it has created pockets which are different within continents, countries and cities.
—Bernard agrees that “at no time literally in human history has the entire planet been united against a common foe” and likens it to the works of science fiction writers or movies such as 1996’s Independence Day which saw an alien foe threatening life on earth. “In some respects this is as close as we’re going to get to that.”
—He says a second pandemic could happen and that thinking is “going to drive a lot of behaviours in the 2020s.”
—Sharon notes society has a very poor relationship not just with certainty but with long term planning ie climate change: “Our intuitions tell us to deal with the short term, that tends to be evolutionary wise what we’re wired to deal with.”
—Bernard notes we are a product of our warless, depression-less times and “in some respects why would we contemplate a global catastrophe?” Says we have been allowed to live in the moment and “only with this virus we’ve suddenly realised the extent to which we’ve been taking risks.”
—Gives the example of Australia’s supply chain network and how we were caught out by having just one manufacturer of medical masks and PPE. Says we need to think about supply chain sovereignty.
—Sharon discusses the idea that the world has been in “the big nap for 75 years” and that after lack of adversity for three generations we “suddenly don’t know how to be this uncomfortable.”
—Bernard agrees: our comfort levels mean “you’re not wired to protect against what might happen in the future” and that we were caught out by thinking there might be a significant military conflict, climate change, terrorism but not attack by a microbe: “I most certainly don’t think corporates or the government have been really prepared for it. If we had we would have had all that critical infrastructure in Australia prior to the pandemic starting.”
09:00 The “uncomfortable” conversation
—Sharon notes that putting in place the critical infrastructure before the pandemic would have been a “very uncomfortable conversation” for politicians to have before the pandemic.
—Bernard says that goes “to the heart” of the problem and that it’s exposes a fragility in our society, with the assumption we had that we would be “able to trade and move freely across the planet unimpeded” forever.
—Says the upsetting of that apple cart could change consumer habits.
—Sharon’s theory is that because employment isn’t secure now people will budget more and that will increase Australia’s reliance on cheap goods from China.
—Bernard half agrees, saying in Australia “you can’t have jobs in the future without creating businesses today” and that supporting the Australian supply chain “is going to be a real theme coming out of this and beyond.”
—Sharon asks if Bernard has “told the unions that … labour costs aren’t dropping anytime soon.”
—Bernard counters that higher wages and prices are “the cost of the Australian lifestyle … if we need to pay a higher price for some Australian goods and services then I think there’s going to be a greater appetite to do that, going forward.”
—Sharon says Bernard seems more optimistic than his written work suggests while she is “more of a pessimist.”
—Bernard says his past caution was turned around by how well Australia came out of the GFC and that he believes a similar situation will arise after coronavirus: “Where on the planet would you rather be at a time of global pandemic?”
17:25 The human desire to get back to normal
—Sharon notes the push to get back to normal seems to ingrained in the human psyche and asks Bernard about the human desire to do it.
—Bernard understands people like routine but expects the post-corona world will be different, with more working from home, a shift in consumer values, and “certainly being grateful for what we do have rather than what we don’t.”
—Sharon believes there will be extended “post-materialism.”
—Bernard agrees values have shifted: people have learned through isolation that in life they don’t need to dress a certain way, have a certain amount of pillows on their bed, to have a valuable life: we don’t have to be perfect.
—Says we have “passed peak Kardashian” and new heroes won’t be influencers but real frontline workers in healthcare and supermarkets.
22:35 The great concern still to come
—Sharon notes we’re never going to have a “sense of wellbeing as long as we focus on the ‘me’ generation and that we need to have an attitude of gratitude, and asks Bernard how he thinks we’re doing.
—He compares our society to other countries and says we’re doing very well. His concerns are how the pandemic will play out in other countries without our healthcare and social welfare systems.
—Sharon is also concerned about countries without Australia’s infrastructure and says while we have taken a hit, our government has been strong and healthy enough to keep us afloat. She wants to keep in focus that other countries are having a different experience.
—Bernard says he feels the Third World will “struggle for a year or two” and a takeaway for the future has to be earlier reporting of outbreaks to better manage threats.
—Sharon says Bill Gates warned us this would happen but we didn’t want to hear, which means our “next generations are going to be inheriting our lack of ability” and that denial “seems to be part of the human experience.”
—She outlines how The Coaching Institute pivoted to an online business in early March and says any line of thinking that convinces us we can sit there and this too will pass “is head in the sand stuff, Bernard.”
—Bernard notes that as well as changing shopping, learning and working habits during lockdown, “hopefully we take the good bits, the good skills and learnings and create a more productive, more efficient society and economy going forward.”
32:20 Social media, survival and society
—Sharon discusses how “one of my biggest bugbears”, social media, is linked directly to teen suicide and that the cost of having had a planet full of teenagers living in front of computers and phones on Facebook and Instagram for months could be catastrophic: “It’s one of my biggest concerns … when we come out the other end how do we unhook them from the way their brains are wired to do only that?”
—Bernard agrees “the social media genie” is out of the bottle but hopes the pandemic’s spotlight on everyday heroes rather than celebrities and influencers will see them admired: “We need to encourage that shift and make sure we don’t shift back to the fakery of living a social media existence.”
—Sharon doubles down, saying lockdown and the situation of young people being in front of screens getting only curated information for months is deleterious to their mental health and development.
—Bernard agrees it’s not “a healthy thing” to have this many young people at home and that going forward a better way will be for them to come together for short periods to collaborate.
37:18 Women in the workforce post-corona
—Sharon asks how much of the “good progress” women have made in the workplace will be unravelled by coronavirus, given women are disproportionately represented among the groups who would have been laid off first (part time, casual.)
—Bernard discusses an ABS quarterly document and agrees we have seen “tremendous gains” made and that “it would be a great shame to see those gains lost as a consequence of the reset in the Australian economy which I think will take place in the winter of 2020.”
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39:18 The narrative Sharon wants to create
—As the podcast wraps up, Sharon says she’d love to see (and is surprised there isn’t already) a narrative created on buying Australian, supporting Australia, and making it economically viable for Australians to do that: “We have an opportunity to create a narrative about how we want post-corona to look and I would love it to look like supporting Australian manufacturing as you said, shoring up our supply chains, having a sovereignty attitude.”
—Bernard says whenever he writes about rebuilding and creating a fairer Australia the response is “extraordinary” and that “Australians are very patriotic when you scratch the surface.”
—Sharon says we need to have an informed discussion about how we want the society to look now, asks if Holden should have folded because it destroyed supply chains. Says the idea is to get out of reaction and into creation.
—Bernard: “It all starts with a conversation and also education.”