The National Cabinet, comprising the prime minister, the state premiers, etc., liken themselves to a wartime high command. They are only tempting a court-martial.

But even now, were they to re-open the economy and successfully recover massive damages from Beijing, they could still redeem themselves.

Future historians will ask how could a virus from a disgusting Wuhan ‘wet market’ or, more likely, from some depraved communist laboratory project, do what two world wars and a depression could not do — turn Australia, one of the world’s oldest democracies, into a grossly indebted, authoritarian and misgoverned polity.