Legends from our own lunchtimes

Friday, April 24, 2020

A Beautiful Set of Numbers.
Tuesday 21st April - Australia - 6645 cases 1889 Active - 261 per million population



Paul Keating was arguably one of Australia's most colourful and effective Prime Ministers.  He is responsible for quite possibly more memorable expressions than Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx combined.

One of those was that's "A beautiful set of numbers" which he coined in 1990 in reference to the 1989 December quarter accounts for the country, but what is generally forgotten is that those numbers were something of a last hurrah as Australia dropped into a miserable two-year recession.

Well our current Covid-19 infection rate and morbidity rate for that matter could only be described as "A beautiful set of numbers" at the moment, and there's no doubt that there will be significant economic pain to come as a result of achieving them thus far, but one hopes that the confidence being displayed in them by the community at large, sneaking out for longer periods, still apart but edging ever closer together as "exercise" morphs into "peering at the horizon", is not a portent of a similar crash of a less humane kind just around the corner.
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1 comment

Don said...

Very complimentary article in the NY Times the other day about Australia and New Zealand's effective response to "le microbe." Much better than the chaos on this side of the Pacific. Luckily we live in the nation-state of California.....

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