Treasury Estimates

The NZ Treasury released its estimates today for the effects on the economy of the Covid19 virus and associated shutdown.

The scenarios considered vary depending on how long the country is kept in each level of the shutdown. I thought scenario 1 looked most realistic; it assumes that Level 4 will last a month, then Level 3 for a month followed by Level 1 or 2 for ten months. The worst case is scenario 4, which assumes Level 4 for three months and Level 3 for 3 months. That does not seem plausible, but I presume it was put in there to make the others seem more acceptable.

Two figures stood out to me. First, if the best scenario applies, quarterly real GDP drops from 64 billion dollars in the March 2020 quarter to 54 billion dollars in the September quarter, when the economy has had quite a few months to recover. That is a drop of 14 percent, which is a huge hit on the economy. It takes out quite a few years’ worth of economic growth at a time when the population has grown rapidly, so the effect on real GDP per capita will be even worse.

The Treasury notes that this number is just an estimate, but I would have preferred that they gave more information about the assumptions on it was based, and an indication of the plausible range for their estimates. It makes a big difference, whether the estimated decline between March and September is between 12 and 16 percent, or whether it is between 9 and 20 percent.

But you cannot eat GDP, so these figures probably do not mean much to many people. However, the other figure that I noted really brings it home.

Under their best-case scenario, the Treasury estimates that unemployment will be 13 percent of the workforce in the September quarter 2020, well after the finish of the lockdown. The New Zealand workforce consists of about 1.5 million people, so 13 percent unemployment means 195,000 people without work. That is a huge amount of pain. Many of those who lose their jobs will be able to collect unemployment benefits, but many others will be the partner of someone who is working, so they will not qualify for a benefit.

My initial response to the estimates is that the Treasury is overconfident about how quickly the economy will recover. I will be interested to see what other economists say about this. It depends on how much account the Treasury has taken of the effects of business closures rippling through the economy.

Treasury seems to be assuming that the world economy will only decline by about 3 percent in the best case, and 6 percent in the worst case. That also seems to be a little optimistic.

• The Chinese economy was already slowing sharply before the virus struck, and it is uncertain how quickly it will recover.

• The US financial sector is very shaky. The collapse in the value of shares and bonds means that many debtors have had to stump more for collateral for their loans. It is not clear that all will be able to do it. Many large corporates have burnt up their cash reserves and are finding it difficult to find credit. There are huge risks around derivatives linked to the price of oil. The Federal Reserve is trying to shore the financial system up with more credit, but it is still not clear that they will be successful.

• As they recover, the nations of the world are like to pull back from dependence on international trade and try to be more self-sufficient. That will increase the cost of producing everything that people need and make life more difficult for exporting nations.

I suspect that as we go out of the shutdown, the New Zealand economy will face stronger headwinds than the Treasury is assuming. The world is not just dealing with a health crisis; it is also facing a financial crisis.

Third Heaven Intercession

A confusing doctrine has emerged in many Christians circles that I call Third Heaven Intercession. This teaching is giving many people a false understanding of how intercession works.

In this teaching, the first heaven is the atmosphere; part of the heavens and earth that God created. The second heaven is the place where the spiritual powers of evil operate (from a reference to the prince of the power of the air in Eph 2:2). The third heaven is the place where God dwells, and Jesus sits (based on where Paul said that he visited in 2 Cor 12:2). Actually, the third heaven is the paradise, where the people who die in the Lord go to be with Jesus, so it is something slightly different, but that is not important for this article (2 Cor 12:4).

The teaching on intercession claims that prayers fail, because intercessors are still operating in the first heaven, seeing things from an earthly level. Their prayers get blocked by the spiritual powers of evil in the second heaven from getting to Jesus in the third heaven..

The solution for intercessors is to understand that they are seated with Jesus at the right hand of the Father (which is true). If they pray from their position there, their prayers will be victorious, because the spiritual powers of evil in the second heaven cannot block them from getting to the Father. Their prayers go to him directly, bypassing any blockages.

Aspects of this teaching are true, and it seems plausible, but it is also misleading because it fails to take account of the nature of authority. Understanding authority is the key to success in intercession.

Having a place in the third heaven is not a guarantee of success in prayer. Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, from where he is interceding on our behalf (Heb 7:25). His position does not give him authority to control everything on earth, so his wishes are not always fulfilled.

Jesus did not want Hitler rising to power and controlling part of the earth and slaughtering many Jews, but he did not have authority to stop him. Jesus did not want Stalin ruling half of Europe and killing many people, including Christians, but he did not have authority to stop him, though he was seated at God’s right hand in heaven (please do not reply that Hitler and Stalin were God’s will for the world).

The truth is that in terms of what happens on earth, authority on earth is much more important than authority in heaven. God gave authority over the earth to humans, so he can only intervene on earth if humans who have authority there give him permission.

Jesus was a human, so he was able to take back the authority on earth from the spiritual powers of evil who had stolen it from humans. After he had died on the cross, the spiritual powers of evil were totally defeated, so Jesus could say that all authority on earth (and heaven) belonged to him. At that moment, he held all authority over the earth. However, he did not keep it for himself, but gave the authority that he had won back to humans. The humans who chose to belong to him submitted to him, so he still had authority in their lives.

Most other people took the freedom (authority in their lives) Jesus had given back to them and resubmitted to the spiritual powers of evil (often unwittingly) by continuing to live their old lives. Jesus could have maintained authority over their lives by sending millions of angels and forcing them to obey his will. He could have sent angels to force Caesar to do what he wanted. Jesus could have threatened to smack down anyone who refused to obey him with angelic power. However, he chose not to do that, because his kingdom is a kingdom of love that cannot be imposed by coercion and force.

Jesus wanted people to be free, even if they rejected him, just as his Father had created them to be free. He wanted people to be free, even if they took the authority that he had won back for them by his terrible death and gave it back to the spiritual powers of evil who had cheated them before.

This is the current authority situation on earth. Jesus has authority in the lives of the people who acknowledge him as Lord, and those who submit to them for various reasons, as employees, children, etc. He has no authority in the lives of the millions who have rejected his wonderful gospel and submitted to the spiritual powers of evil.

The spiritual powers of evil have authority in the lives of people who have rejected the gospel and chosen sin and evil. This gives the powers of evil authority in the places and institutions on earth where these people have authority (even if they are located in the second heaven). Christians cannot override the decisions of these people, even if they are seated with Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

The Holy Spirit is everywhere, so the spiritual powers of evil cannot prevent the Father from hearing out prayer. The idea that our prayers can be blocked in the second heaven by the spiritual powers of evil is nonsense. Nor can they cannot stop the Holy Spirit from speaking to us, unless we have unwittingly given them permission by sinning.

All this means that our intercession will be more effective in situations where we have authority.

Parents have authority over their children. Elders have authority over the people in the body of Jesus who have submitted to them. That is why people in trouble should call on their elders to pray for them. When people submit to us by asking us to pray for them, that gives authority to our prayers into their lives.

Business people and have authority over their employees while they are at work. Managers have authority over the people who report to them. This opens the way to pray effectively for them, although this is always limited authority. Teachers have authority over the students in their classes, so this makes their prayers effective, within the limits of the authority that the students have also given to other people like parents and spouses.

Everyone has the right to speak to their political leaders, so we have the authority to release the Holy Spirit to speak to them. However, we do not have authority to make them obey his voice. However, if a president or king asks a prophet for advice, that gives the prophet extra authority when praying for him/her. Of course, the president or king will be submitting to other people too. If he/she gives them more authority, the prayers of the prophet may be nullified.

Authority is the key to effective intercession, not our place in the spiritual realms. That said, when we are in a place of authority, and are confronting evil, the fact that we are sitting with Jesus at the right hand of the Father with all his authority behind us is critically important. In situations where we have authority, the spiritual powers of evil have to surrender and submit to our declarations and decrees, if we speak on Jesus’ behalf and according to his will. In these situations, the reality that we are seated in the spiritual realms at God’s right hand means that they have to submit us.

The key to intercession is to seek authority: not imposing it on others by force, but whenever people freely submit to us for whatever reason, we should accept the authority and use it to pray for them. Authority makes intercession effective.

Australia v New Zealand

The New Zealand Government has imposed much tighter shutdown restrictions than its Australian counterpart. New Zealanders accepted this, because they believed that New Zealand was doing better against the virus than Australia. However, a retired Reserve Bank economist Michael Reddell has done some analysis that shows that we might be kidding ourselves. His graph illustrates his story clearly.

Kingdom Authority

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Three Problems

The lockdown in New Zealand seems to have successfully slowed the spread of Covid19. However, three problems have become evident.

First, the virus was brought and spread here by returning international travellers. The government was too slow to restrict travellers from countries with spreading infection, to put in place adequate screening at airports, and introduce strict quarantine for people with risk of infection.

Second, many of the big clusters of infection spread at big social functions, like parties and weddings. The government introduced a ban on meetings of more than a 100 people on 19 March, a week before the lockdown began on 26 March. A ban on meetings of more than 500 people had been in place since 16 March. In hindsight this tolerance of large social functions was a mistake, as in the ten days before the lockdown, big social functions allowed the virus to spread and create large clusters of infection. A much tighter limit on the number of people at a social gathering during this period would have significantly reduced the spread of infection.

Third, the virus has spread quickly in some large rest homes and associated dementia units. The way that we care for our elderly and vulnerable people with disabilities has been exposed as vulnerable to an epidemic.

In New Zealand, as in many places in the western world, the elderly are mostly secluded away in massive rest home facilities, which can house several hundreds of people on one site, offering variable levels of care. These rest homes are operated by large corporates, which make their money by selling units to retired people and then buying them back at a lower price, when the owner dies, or moves because they need a higher level of care. Any capital gains go to the corporate owner.

In the rest home part of the facility, elderly people sit close together in a large, shared lounge. The rest home facilities need a large staff of carers, administrators, nurses, cleaners, cooks, etc. Most of these positions are very poorly paid, so they have to be staffed by recent migrants, who are willing to do unpleasant work for poor pay. The government pays for people who have used up all their assets, so it is happy for the costs to be pushed down.

The government banned all people from visiting rest homes, to reduce the risk of infection. But large numbers of workers go in and out every day. The risk of them bring in infection is higher, because migrants travel overseas more frequently to visit their families, sometimes to places where the virus was spreading. The other problem is that poorly paid employees are often reluctant to stay home from work if they are sickening, because they cannot afford to lose their income.

The way we care for the elderly is a recipe for problems during an epidemic. I hope that when this is over, the government and the nation will find a better way to care for our elderly than our current financialise, corporatised system. They deserve better.

Being Church Where We Live

To celebrate Jesus’ death on the cross, by which he disarmed and defeated the spiritual powers of evil, and triumphed over them by destroying their hold over the world, and to speed the coming of his Kingdom, the Kindle version of my book called Being Church Where We Live will be available for $1.00 at Amazon US and £1 at Amazon UK. This offer lasts for 48 hours. If you do not have a Kindle, you can download a kindle app and read in on your phone or tablet.

Balance Sheet Evolution

AdventuresinCapitalism explains why large corporates are vulnerable to a crisis like Covid19.

Excluding brief periods of exuberance at the end of the 1920s and 1960s most public companies historically were staid organizations—they grew a few percent a year and paid out some of their profits in dividends. Boards of directors were mainly recruited from large shareholders who were more focused on sustainability than quarterly numbers or pushing the share price. Sure, there were outliers, there were guys doing crazy things, but a large portion of corporate America was focused on building long-term wealth for the large shareholders (often the families who controlled these businesses).

Then came Mike Milken and his cohort of extortioners and restructuring artists. Don’t get me wrong, by the 1980s, many US corporations had grown fat and a bit lazy—a good shake-up was needed, but the following generation of financial engineers took things too far. I’m all about improving returns on assets (ROA)—my gripe is that the focus then shifted to returns on equity (ROE). Here’s a simple exercise, take a mediocre business, add ten turns of leverage and then marvel at how amazing the returns to equity are. For the past generation, every corporate executive has undertaken a similar exercise and congratulated themselves on the results. For the holdouts who refused to lever up, there was a wolf-pack of hedge funds ready to pounce and educate them on why returning too much capital to shareholders was necessary. Is it any wonder that corporate balance sheets are such a mess today? Like a wounded gazelle, if your leverage ratios were low, you were pounced upon and told to lever up.

Twelve years out from the GFC, businesses should have had strong cash reserves.

There was no rainy-day fund. There was no excess capital beyond a revolver that lasts only a few weeks at best. What should have been excess cash reserves were squandered long ago on buybacks at all-time high multiples.

When we are through crisis, these corporates will have to pay down some of their debt, and increase cash reserves and shareholder equity. That will significant reduce the return on equity, putting pressure on share prices.

As we come out of this COVID-19 crisis, I suspect that Directors will demand larger liquidity buffers. How much of a buffer? What if you need six months of op-ex in cash on the balance sheet? What if Directors demand Japan style balance sheets? What happens when you take leverage down at most corporations? You end up with middling ROEs and reduced valuations (like in Japan). I suspect that ROEs across corporate America are going to converge towards a new and much lower level.

Tourism Decline

One thing very clear, tourism is the sect of the economy that will be most affected by the coronavirus shutdown.

Tourism affects many industries (accommodation, retail, transport, etc) so Statistics NZ produces a satellite account to the National Accounts that measures the size of the tourism sector. Some of the data series integrated into it are a bit dodgy, and some of the underlying assumptions behind the ratios used are not very robust, but it does give a reasonable indication of the size of the tourism sector in New Zealand.

The account measures the size of the tourism sector in two ways.

• The direct measure cover business that deal directly with tourists.
• The indirect measure includes businesses that supply the intermediate inputs used in producing goods and services for tourists.

The account for 2019 shows the following results.

Direct tourism value added is 5.2 of GDP.
Indirect tourism value added is 4.3% of GDP.
Total tourism is 9.5% of GDP.

The satellite account also estimates employment in the sector.

Tourism directly employed 230,000 people, which is 8.4 percent of total employment.
A further 160,000 were indirectly employed in tourism generating an additional 6.0 percent share of total employment.
This suggests that the employment of nearly 400,000 people depends on tourism. They are about 14.4% of the workforce.

Business and government travel, which is a smaller segment of tourism (about 15%). The bulk is split fairly evenly between international and domestic tourism. Once we move down from Alert Level 4, business and government travel will begin again, but at a much lower level. International tourism will cease for several years, as strict border restrictions will need to be in place for quite some time, and even when they are removed people will be scared of international travel. Inter-regional travel will be constrained for a while too. With reduced incomes, people will have less spare cash to spend on travel within New Zealand. These factors mean that we can expect a big decline in the tourism sector persisting over the next few years.

If all of the direct and indirect employment on international tourism activities disappear for and half of those with domestic tourism disappear, that could be nearly 300,000 jobs gone. About 6 percent of GDP could disappear.

Only 5% of those directly employed in tourism are in air transport. 13% are in accommodation (hotels, motels, etc). Nearly 30 percent are in the Food and Beverage Services (restaurants, takeaways, bars, etc). 15 percent are in Retail Trade. We have seen airlines putting off staff, but the decline in the accommodation, food services, and retail industries is still to come.

Of course, when these people lose their jobs and income, they will stop buying, so the effect ripples out to other businesses not directly or indirectly connected to tourism. So, the overall effect of the shutdown could be much greater.

Psalm 91

In this season, Psalm 91 is an incredibly popular passage. It has some amazing promises, but they are often misunderstood.

The Psalm begins with a statement about the people to whom the promise of the Psalm applies.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty (Psalm 91:1).

The Psalm is a promise to people who live in God’s shelter. To be in his shadow we need to be walking in faith in obedience to the leading of his Spirit. The promise is also for those who abide in his shadow. Jesus told us what it means to abide in him.

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing (John 15:4-5).

To be safe, we must abide in Jesus. He reminded his followers that his body is like a vine with many branches. To be linked to him, we must be linked to other followers of Jesus, who are linked to him and to others that are following him.

Abiding in Jesus means belonging to a body of people who are following him and who love each other as he loved us, serving each other, and submitting to each other. When we submit to each other in love, we give the members of the body close to us authority to pray into our lives and release the gifts of the Spirits toward us.

God promised made this promise to those who abide in the body of Jesus.

Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare
and from the deadly pestilence (Psalm 91:3).

This is not a promise for people wandering around doing their own thing in isolation from other believers. It is for people who belong to a body that is living in obedience to Jesus in the power of the Spirit. They will be loving one another and submitted to each other, so they will have authority to stand against evil attacks on behalf of those that are joined to them. This body of believers will be able to receive the gift of healing and the gift of faith to pray in the power of the Spirit for people who are sick. They will stand together to enforce the victory over evil that Jesus achieved by his death and resurrection.

We are living in a time when the church has struggled to deal with sickness. Given what Jesus accomplished on the cross, we should be seeing far more healings of sick people than we are seeing. This means that we are not as well prepared to deal with the coronavirus virus as we could be. If I struggled to defeat the last attack of the common cold that struck me by standing against it in faith and the power of the Spirit, I am probably foolish to assume that I can defeat coronavirus by faith. We need to belong to a body that understands the gift of healing and the victory that Jesus achieved on the cross.

Psalm 91 is not a magic charm. It is a way of life in unity with other followers of Jesus. It is a promise to a body of believers who are serving together in the power of the Holy Spirit. The best protection against any pestilence is to be in a body of believers who are confident in releasing the gifts of the Spirit, especially the gifts of healing and faith.

Kingdom Come

In recent years, there has been massive talk in Christian circles about the kingdom of God. “Kingdom” become a popular adjective that gets tagged onto everything that the church does. Yet despite all the talk about the kingdom, most Christians still do not really believe the kingdom can actually come on earth. At best they hope for a slightly better church, or a better government at the next election, but neither is a vision of the kingdom that stirs hearts the way that Jesus did. The Passion translation refers to “God’s kingdom realm”, which makes it seem vague and invisible.

Part of the problem is that Jesus vision of the Kingdom simply does not fit with the modern model of church, and leaders are unwilling to give their vision for something radically different. Jesus said that the people need a radical change of thinking to be able to accept his Kingdom. That has not changed.

Uncertain Vaccine

Everyone seems to be assuming that a vaccine will be found for the Covid19, and that once it has been released to the world, everything that has been disrupted will return to normal. Americans assume that, even if the Chinese fail to do it, American drug companies will succeed in producing a vaccine, because Trump has made America great again. I suspect that this is humanist over-confidence. Modern nations assume every problem can be solved by human ingenuity. We have modern technology so everything will be fine.

However, there is no guarantee that an effective an economic vaccine will be discovered. If the virus was created by the spiritual powers of evil, they may be just clever enough to create one that is immune to a vaccine.

A vaccine that works in the laboratory is not always easy to get into the field. The flu vaccine is happy being carried in egg yoke, but other potential vaccines might not be so easy to deliver. Potential vaccines have to be tested carefully, as if they are not exactly right, they can make recipients more vulnerable to the disease. Therefore, we should not assume that a vaccine can be developed, as there are many viruses for which no vaccine has possible. For example, there is no effective vaccine for the common cold despite extensive research. A vaccine for Shingles took ten years to develop.

Political leaders should be thinking about how they will respond if an effective vaccine for Covid19 cannot be developed. The virus could be swirling around the world for several years. There is no certainty yet that the antibodies developed by people who have recovered from the virus will be effective for many years after the event. In the worst case, people who have been infected with Covid19 might be infected again and again, just like humans are affected with the common cold over and over again.

If the worst happens and Covid19 whirls around the world each winter, international air travel is like to be severely constrained. People who arrive on an aeroplane from another nation will probably have to be quarantined for two weeks when they arrive. That will put most people off travelling at all. International tourism will be totally impractical. Local quarantine areas might need to be established to constrain outbreaks of the virus. Our ability to move from city to city and town to town will be severely listed. Many things that we currently do will become impractical.

Here in New Zealand, by locking down the borders and imposing self-isolation on everyone, the government seems to have dramatically flattened the curve. Only fifteen infected people are in hospital and the number of new cases has levelled, and may be falling. The problem with this is that this leaves the country with almost no herd immunity, but carrying the cost of a massive shutdown.

Some experts are suggesting that the virus could come in waves, as happened with the 1918 flu. New Zealand skipped the first wave due to restrictions on travel during wartime, but was hit hard in the second wave in November 1918. If a second wave of the covid19 arrives, NZ might have to go through a second costly lockdown, which I am not sure the country could bear. The alternative would be to keep the border restricted putting all international visitors through a two-week quarantine for quite some time.

Church Reset

Many people who are widely recognised as prophets (Lana Vawser, DC Lake, Anita Alexander, Kris Vallotton) are saying that God is calling a “Reset” for the church. I witness with this call, but I am worried that none of them are saying what they mean, or what God wants to change.

When I think of the word “reset”, I think of a factory reset of my smartphone. It is a drastic action, because it solves problems, but you end up losing a lot of stuff that was precious. I have only done it once when I was really desperate. Therefore, I presume that a reset will mean radical change for the church, and that much of what seems important to us will have to be let go.

The prophetic people are talking about a change in governmental authority, but they are not very clear about what that means. Maybe they do not know what it means themselves, but it often seems like a different group of people controlling the church. Or Christians leaders controlling civil governments.

The prophetic people are saying that God is giving new blueprints, but I do not see the new blueprints anywhere. Maybe they do not have them yet, but it is confusing, because a call for change needs to tell people how they should change.

I sense that despite the call for a reset, most Christian leaders are only interested in tweaking the existing church model. I do not detect an appetite for serious change, even amongst followers who “like” prophetic posts. No one is willing to give up the pastor-executive model of leadership, driving to church on a Sunday, sermon-centric discipling, which make the modern church what it is and move to a relationship-based way of following Jesus. Despite all the talk about the Kingdom of God, I sense that no one really believes that the Kingdom of God can come in fulness in our time, or how that would happen.

I seem to be on a different planet. Forty years ago, when I started as an enthusiastic young pastor, the word I received from the Lord was Hebrews 8:5.

See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.

Two or three years on, and frustrated that things were not happening as I had hoped, I realised that I was just doing what other churches and pastors were doing. I had not bothered waiting to get the pattern/blueprint from God on the mountain.

So, I put everything aside, and began seeking God and studying the New Testament to see how the church was meant to function. What I discovered was radically different and utterly challenging, but I got a strong sense of what Jesus wanted the church to be. It cost me my job and my house, because I could not continue in a role which was not part of Jesus plan.

I published my insights in a little booklet called the Bride of Christ in the early 1980s. It had a great reception, mostly by word of mouth (because this was before the time of the internet). In a short time, the 2000 copies that I had printed were sold out. But nothing really changed. I then realised that readers had enjoyed my critique of the church, but had not understood the alternative blueprint that I was describing. So I rewrote the book to make the pattern much clearer and called it Being Church Where We Live. The Lord told me to leave out everything critical of the existing church and focus on sharing the vision, which I did.

The response has been interesting. The book is radical, so I expected criticism. Yet not one person has come to me and said, “What you have written is not consistent with the scriptures”. I do not expect to be right on everything I write, but not one person has said, “I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but I think you have got that bit wrong, or missed this thing which is important”. No one has even said, “I believe that God is saying something different” or even “What you describe will not work”. Instead, the response has been almost total disinterest.

So I have to conclude that most Christian leaders and their followers are not really interested in making serious changes to the way that they do church. They prefer to stick with the pastor/executive model and going to church on Sundays. I presume this is why the blueprints for the reset are missing.

I realise from working on numerous IT projects over the years, that most people just want the new system to do what the old system did. They can’t visualise how new technology could change the way that they do things to make their work more effective and more efficient. Most IT projects fail to deliver their potential, because they get stuck on replicating what was done in the past, because people cannot visualise how things could be done differently and better.

This seems to be the situation in the church. Very few people have the ability to visualise a church different from what they know. This is where we need prophets to share a radically different vision for the church. And then we need radical leaders, who will give up the security of what they know, and are comfortable with despite it not working, and have a go at something different.

I don’t expect people to follow my way. I know that my version of the pattern on the mountain is not perfect, or complete. I would be quite happy if followers of Jesus found a different way of changing and pursued that. What I struggle with is complacency about the status quo. It is clear that what the church is currently doing is not working as it should, and is not viable through a crisis, so we urgently need a different way of being church.

I wish that there were many prophets and other people sharing their understanding of “the pattern they have received on the mountain” and different blueprints to stir up people who cannot see beyond the what they have now. And I wish that more people were willing to have a try at something really different. The future of the church depends on it.

Having to shut down church services to prevent the spread of coronavirus has been a wake-up call for the church. Paul people are talking about a new normal, but I worry that when the current crisis is finished, mortgage and salary commitments will force leaders back into the existing, but inadequate, model of church.

When I was young, I thought I was part of a radical generation. I realise now that we were probably deceiving ourselves. I hope the rising generations are truly radical and bold enough to take up the challenge to be the church that God needs to win the world for Jesus and establish his glorious Kingdom.

Black Flu 1918

When the news first came out about the coronavirus, I got a couple of books about an earlier pandemic by Geoffrey Rice out of the library, in order to get a better perspective on what we are facing. One was called Black Flu 1918: The Story of New Zealand's Worst Public Health Disaster. The disease was called the “black flu” because the most severe cases contracted bacterial pneumonia, and the lack of oxygen caused their body to go a black colour.

In New Zealand, about 9000 people died of this flu epidemic. This was half of the number of people killed during the first world war, so it was a hugely serious loss. If the same death rate applied to the current population, that would be 30,000 deaths; ie the entire city of Timaru.

The flu epidemic was quickly forgotten. No public memorials were built. It seems that the people who were numbed by the death and horror of the war, quickly forgot what happened and life moved on; except for those who lost family members.

The following are some quotes from Rice’s book.

Most victims of the 1918 flu pandemic died from pneumonia, a bacterial infection of the lungs that caused a prolonged fever and blood-streaked phlegm. Chest pain and shortness of breath were warning signs.

Influenza is a dangerous disease because it often unleashes secondary bacterial infections. Bronchitis is a bacterial infection of the tubes that Bronchitis is a bacterial infection of the tubes that carry air to and from the lungs, while pneumonia is an infection inside the lungs, and can be much more serious. Unless treated with antibiotics, pneumonia can be deadly.

Influenza pandemics normally only kill the very young and the very old. But the 1918 pandemic was different, and quite unusual. As well as infants and the elderly, it killed healthy adults the prime of life, especially in the age groups between 20 and 45 years. In New Zealand, it killed more men than women in these age groups, and we still don’t know “why. Children between the ages of five and 15 were the least likely to die in the 1918 flu.

I was surprised by how quick the epidemic came and went.

The first victims were struck in late October 1918. By 26 October, 28 nurses at Auckland Hospital had reported sick with flu, and by 30 October, the Post Office, which was a large employer, reported 330 employees absent. Most deaths in New Zealand occurred within about 3 weeks at the beginning of November.

By late December 1918, most parts of New Zealand were over the worst of the flu. Shops reopened, factories were able to resume production as workers returned and transport services returned to normal.

The virus probably arrived in New Zealand on returning troopships. Although schools had to be closed early for the summer school holiday, there was no attempt to impose a general shutdown. The virus spread rapidly during peace celebrations that were held in mid-November to celebrate the end of the war on 11 November 1918.

By the time news of the Armistice was made official on 12 November, most New Zealand towns and cities were fully gripped by the pandemic. Yet in many places, peace celebrations went ahead regardless, as people had been preparing processions and speeches for weeks beforehand.

Christchurch, the South Islands largest city, held its provincial holiday in early November to coincide with the Canterbury AMP Show and major race meetings. Hundreds of people came to Christchurch for Carnival Week each year, and 1918 was no exception.

Australia forced all returning troops ships to be quarantined, and the country entirely escaped the epidemic in 1918. However, Australia was hit by a third wave of the epidemic in late 1919, but by then the flu virus was much less virulent.

The health system was overwhelmed by sick people, but had very few effective remedies for the flu. Many people had to be cared for at home by family members and neighbours, although this probably helped the virus to spread. Many people died in their own home, some without receiving medical care.

Slow communication hampered government actions to deal with the crisis. Sometimes messages took three days to get from the government in Wellington to the medical people in Auckland dealing with the crisis. The virus travelled from the north to the south. Wellington council was probably late getting prepared, because they did not understand how serious the problem was in Auckland.

Economic statistics were not as extensive back then, but it seems that the economy recovered quickly. I presume this was because the economy was dominated by agriculture, which was largely unaffected, because the post-war world was desperate for food and clothing. The returning soldiers were absorbed into the workforce quickly and within a couple of years later land prices were booming (that was another tragedy, which seriously harmed many families).

Media Conferences

All over the world, it has become the custom for government officials and political leaders to hold a media conference on national television, updating the latest information about the spread of the coronavirus, and describing government activities to deal with it.

Having done media training, in which I was taught how to tell the media what I wanted them to hear, rather than what they wanted to know, I am a bit cynical about what is said in news conferences.

At least NZ, social distancing has stopped the cheesy American practice of having half a dozen people crowding the speaker and cluttering the camera shot with agonised looks on their faces.

I know from doing time, that when a bureaucrat says that they are “doing some work on something”, it means that they are embarrassed because they have been caught short on something they are responsible for doing, and they are desperately trying to put the problem right, before anyone notices their failure.

At a news conference two days ago, a senior health official used the expression four times.

When an official speaking to a press conference seems confused and uncertain, I can’t help wondering if they are out of their depth and the department they manage is not functioning well.

When I see an official at a press conference speaking confidently and clearly, and easily diverting tricky questions, I am reminded of Roger Sutton, the CEO of the Electricity lines company during the Christchurch earthquake. He went on television every night following the earthquake and talked about what his company was doing to restore electricity. He spoke with confidence and flair, so people were wowed with his grasp of the issues and challenges. A few years later, after he had been appointed to lead and important earthquake recovery agency, which continued to perform badly under his leadership, news emerged that he been forced to step down from due to sleazy behaviour.

The electricity company continued on fine without him and it became clear the restoration of the electricity system was organized by his boring, but competent, deputy, and some experienced engineers who quickly developed bold and clever plans to install portable generators, substations and to build a new high voltage transmission line into the worst affect areas.

Ability to wow a media conference does not tell us much about the effectiveness of the organisation the speaker is leading. In the current media conferences, some hints of an organisation that has been caught out and is struggling to catch up have sneaked through.

Polio and Diphteria

When reading about the effects of the coronavirus, I got thinking about polio and diphtheria, which were serious medical issues in the last century.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, there was huge fear of polio. The fact that it hit children increased the fear. Some people still thought that it was caused by sun on the back of the neck, we were made to wear sunhats that covered the back of the neck when we went outside.

I did not know of any children who got the disease, but two men in the farming district where we lived had a seriously shrivelled arm due to contracting polio when they were young, presumably during the 1937 outbreak. I also remember hearing about a young woman, who lived many years in an iron lung (probably a Both-Nuffield model) in the Timaru hospital due to lung problems caused by polio.

I did a bit of digging around on the internet and found that polio was a much more serious problem than I had realised, and large numbers of deaths resulted.

Poliomyelitis (polio) is caused by a virus, polio is an incurable disease whose symptoms can range from none at all (95 per cent of cases) through to paralysis (up to 2 per cent) in limbs or the respiratory system. Unfortunately, the older the patient, the more serious the paralysis.

The worst years in New Zealand were:

• 1916 - 1018 new cases; 123 deaths
• 1925 - 1159 - - 173
• 1937 - 816 - - - 39
• 1948 - 963 - - - 52
• 1952 - 890 - - - 57
• 1955 - 703 - - - 29
• 1956 - 897 - - - 50

I had not realised that 70 children died of polio during my first years at school although I presume that they were mostly in the North Island.

During 1948 and 1949, children were prohibited from staying in motor camps and attending Sunday schools, and inter-island travel by school children was forbidden. Swimming pools in Auckland were closed to children. In Hamilton, a Christmas parade was permitted, provided the children stood at least 6 feet (1.83m) apart.

Quarantine measures continued to be applied to all diagnosed cases, however mild. Suspect patients were isolated and school contacts excluded until the diagnosis was confirmed. Peer group contacts, and family contacts who were teachers were also quarantined for two weeks from the last exposure to infection.

In January 1948, the Minister of Education announced that all schools would be closed until Easter - "the danger of a deadly epidemic must be met." Lessons would be by correspondence and supplemented by broadcasts: "every home will become a miniature school." Assignments from the Correspondence School in the. form of booklets for each class from Primer Three to Form II were distributed to pupils, who sent the completed work to teachers for marking. The Education Department arranged for the posting of assignments to be free of charge.

The broadcast lessons began with a session between 9.30 and 10 am for Primers to Standard Two. The programmes provided activity in the form of written work which the children will do as a follow-up. Standard Three to Form II had talks on music appreciation, current news, nature study, social studies, literature and "two special quiz sessions to test their listening", between 11 and 11.30 am. Secondary schools broadcasts covering English, social studies, general science and mathematics were broadcast in the afternoon.

Most schools in New Zealand re-opened on 1 March 1948, although those in Auckland, and in some other individual places, did not re-open until 19 April.

I do not remember how old I was but I can remember being vaccinated for polio. A public health nurse came to school and gave us the vaccine in a drink in a screened-off corner of the schoolroom. Evidently, the start of the program vaccination had to be delayed when the first batch of vaccine intended for New Zealand failed tests in Great Britain. The first vaccine arrived in New Zealand in September 1956. 5-9 year-olds were vaccinated first, because they were at school they were easy to organise. Also, this age group had an "indifference to personal hygiene" which made them good spreaders of infection.

Consent cards were sent out to the parents of all primary school children The acceptance rate by parents was over 90% which was an incredibly high rate for any public health measure anywhere. By Spring 1959, all children between two and 16 had been vaccinated. Polio vaccine was later added to the recommended vaccine for diphtheria and whooping cough at three months.

Diphtheria was another disease that created real fear. I remember my mother talking about what a nasty illness it was. Diphtheria is a serious bacterial infection that infects the throat and nose. While some cases may were mild, the bacteria could produce dangerous toxins that caused severe complications which can be life-threatening, including heart trouble, paralysis, and kidney failure.

The worst year for diphtheria was in New Zealand was 1892, when 281 deaths occurred. In 1917, the year before the flu epidemic 240 people died of diphtheria. An outbreak in 1929–30 resulted in 150 deaths. During the second world war, a number of NZ soldiers died of diphtheria while fighting overseas.

Shutdown Decision

Government departments like to do cost-benefit analysis before making policy decisions. They evaluate the benefits and assess the costs against them to ascertain whether a policy is justified. Of course, political factors will often overrule the outcomes of the cost-benefit analysis.

Governments make cost-benefit decision all the time, even where human lives are involved. For example, if the government was to build median barriers on every single road in the county, it would reduce the road toll, but the horrific cost means that no government would ever consider doing it. Because some country roads have very few vehicles on them, the benefit does not justify the cost.

Unfortunately, as I explain in an article called cost-benefit analysis the information needed to support good cost-benefit analysis often does not exist. Although there is not much evidence of serious cost-benefit analysis, this is particularly true in the case of the policy decision to impose a major lockdown of the economy to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

Benefits
The people making the decision simply did not have the information that they needed to make a really confident decision. On the benefit side, it is almost impossible to assess how effective a four-week shutdown will be for stopping the spread of the virus. It is well understood that quarantines have an effect in reducing disease, but it is less certain about how effective they will be in this case.

The problem is that the key information about the virus is still sketchy. Scientists cannot conduct controlled experiments in which they infect people and measure the outcomes. That would be immoral. Instead, they undertake statistical analysis of the existing cases and identify patterns and measure outcomes from past actions and events.

Strong statistics need robust definitions and classifications of data to be meaningful. And to calculate rates affected in a particular way, they need an accurate measure of the total number of people infected (the denominator). In the case of Covid19, the definitions used have changed significantly over time, and from place to place. “Cause of death” is very difficult to measure at the best of times, because in many cases, a death will have many causes, and it will not be clear which one was the final cause. For some cases included in the statistics, Covid19 may not have been the actual cause of death, even if it was present.

And because not everyone has serious symptoms, and not everyone is tested, it is impossible to know the total number that is actually affected. The uncertain denominator undermines the reliability of any measure of death rates, spread rates and infection rates for different nations and particular groups of the population.

During a pandemic, clinicians are working flat tack to care for the people who are sick. They do not have time to sit around filling in forms and counting numbers of patients, or hold committee discussions to ensure that the cause of a death is recorded accurately.

This was particularly true in Wuhan when the disease first broke out. At first, they did not even realise that they were dealing with a new virus. Doctors look for sicknesses that they know about, so by the time they realised it was a new virus, they were unable to go back and count up the statistics accurately. They did well to complete a DNA analysis of the virus and make it available to scientist around the world in early January. Not surprisingly, their statistics are frequently questioned.

The statistics that the medical bureaucrats publish are going to be full of errors that can make them misleading. For example, the media quote each day the total number of cases in the world, as if it was the correct number. Actually, those counting are just giving an estimate, with a huge amount of error attached to it. The statisticians will hope the double-counts in the data will be balanced out by the missing records, but there is no way of knowing.

This uncertainty about numbers is one reason why there is so much debate about the death rate for Covid19. Both the numbers for the numerator and the denominator are weak estimates, so the calculated rates need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Since they cannot do experiments to measure the outcome of various policy actions, health experts have to develop models to estimate the number of deaths if particular policy actions are taken, or not taken. The validity of these models depends on the robustness of the data that is fed into the model. Unfortunately, much of the data needed for these models, such as death rates and spread rates, is of uncertain quality.

The other problem with models is that researchers need to make assumptions about human behaviour and the way people will respond in different situations. A model is only as strong as the assumptions underlying it. In a way, the results that the model produces can be easily tweaked to get the results that are wanted, and researchers are often pressured to do that. The experience and judgment of the people developing the models will be critical for getting reliable results.

I suspect that part of the problem is the skills and experience of the people in the Ministry of Health who are making the policy recommendations to the government. I imagine that “public health” is seen as a bit of backwater by medical professionals, so it will not attract the best brains. I presume that most trained doctors can make better money in other fields, so those who end up the Ministry of Health are not likely to be the top people.

This seems to be confirmed by the lack of planning that is becoming evident. On the 27th January, a press release from the Ministry of Health said that “There is still a risk that the illness will arrive in New Zealand. However, the likelihood of further transmission - if we do get a case - to another person, is low to moderate, and the likelihood of a sustained outbreak in New Zealand remains low.” This was surprising given that so many Chinese tourists visit New Zealand and students arrive to start their study at this time of year.

This lack of concern probably explains why the Ministry of Health has been so slow to order more ventilators and personal protection equipment like masks. It also seems to explain why they have been captured by the health academics who shouted the loudest in support of policy changes.

All this means that the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis is very uncertain. The number of deaths the shutdown will actually prevent is not very clear. The government has quoted the worst-case outcomes of the modelling, but that has been mainly to scare people into self-isolating as the policy requires.

Costs
The costs of the economic shut down will be extensive. The media are asking for the release of Treasury estimates, but they probably don’t have any that are defensible. Private-sector economists can make estimates without much accountability, but those in the Treasury need to be able to defend their estimates and be careful they don’t cause unwise behaviour by scaring people unnecessarily.

Measuring economic activity is never easy, even in ordinary times. Estimates of GDP are built up from numerous statistical series which have different degrees of reliability. The model used involves many assumptions and weights for aggregating series together. These assumptions and weights are justified in times of gradual economic change, but when a calamitous shock occurs, they probably breakdown.

The Department of Statistics will have difficulty measuring the increase in unemployment and the decline in production that results from the shutdown. The standard method for measuring unemployment relies on a household survey conducted by personal visit and telephone. They will be more difficult to conduct during a shutdown when homes cannot be visited.

Output is measured using a mix of surveys and administrative data, particularly tax data. Survey data might be more difficult to collect, and administrative data will be difficult to analyse and interpret, because businesses that have closed might still be making tax payments and paying final wage payments to employees whom they have already let go. The statisticians will attempt to put some mitigations in place, but they will be less confident in their results at a time when they are more important.

If measuring the economic outcome of the shutdown will be difficult, estimating the impact in advance is almost impossible. The Treasury has economic models, but the assumptions and economic relationships that undergird them will probably break down in a time of such calamitous change. The judgement of the skilled analyst interpreting the results will be really important.

Insiders have recently suggested that there has been a significant decline in the skills and expertise of Treasury officers in the last few years. If this is true, they will be struggling to come up with robust estimates of the impact of the shutdown and asses their reliability.

At least, they are good people who want to do the right thing, even if they do not know what to do. This is different from the situation in the United States, where the same group of people work in the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury and the big investment banks like Goldman Sachs. They rotate from one to the other to get ahead, so they all think the same way, and they all believe that what they are doing is important and worth big money. They do not know what to do either, so they just keep doing more of the same, hoping that it will work, and looking out for their mates.

A big problem for these experts is that they simply do not know how long that the shutdown will last. They probably don’t have much information about the cash reserves of businesses, as they go into the shutdown. And they have no understanding of how the owners and managers of businesses are thinking, and how many of them are already feeling that it will too hard to keep going.

All this means that when it comes to assessing the costs of the shutdown (to balance against the benefits) Treasury economists are driving in the dark.

Government Decisions
When deciding if a shut down of the economy is the correct response to a pandemic, no one has the information that is needed to undertake a cost-benefit analysis that would support good decision making. I don’t have the information to know if they have done the right thing.
Politicians are conservative. They have all learnt the lesson from George W Bush during Hurricane Katrina that it is better to do something, even if it is the wrong thing, than being seen to do nothing. Politicians now have a bias for action, so I presume that they would have introduced a lockdown, even if the decision was not supported by cost-benefit analysis.

The lack of information for cost-benefit and marginal analysis has another serious consequence. No one really knows what effect social-distancing will have on the spread of infection or how effective quarantining has been. Governments will have to decide when and how to reverse the shutdown. That decision will have to be made with very little supporting evidence. If they reverse too soon, a second outbreak of infection might occur. If they act too late, they will exacerbate the damage to the economy.

So again, the politicians will be conservative and wait till they are rarely certain before winding back the shutdown. This is an election year, so they don’t want to be embarrassed by a second outbreak of infections, when the election is closer. They can always justify the economic costs by claiming that there was no other alternative, even though there always is.

Assessment
One week into the lockdown, it seems to be slowing the spread of the virus. Most hospitals only have one Covid19 patient, so the health system is not being overwhelmed. However, in a months’ time when the real economic costs are becoming clearer, I expect that people might be saying that the lockdown was unnecessarily severe.

Already, the biggest mistake seems to have been leaving the border open to cruise ships too long, and not restricting visitors from places where the virus had spread. They shut out visitors from China quite early, but then were too slow to restrict visitors from Australia, USA and Europe when it was spreading there.

Another mistake was telling citizens who were travelling overseas to come home quickly, without having a plan in place to screen the huge numbers arriving at airports for symptoms and risk of infection, and enforcing a strict quarantine on those deemed to be a risk. These people were allowed to trek back to their homes on places while mixing with people who had not travelled. Much of the spread of the virus has come from them.

I realise that these people are glad to be home, and that the parents of travelling children are glad to have them back with them, but they should have had health insurance to pay for health care where they were, and they should realise that their quick return has had a significant cost for the rest of the nation by making more a more severe and prolonged shut down necessary. Costs and benefits usually fall unevenly.

This was privileging of people who had travelled overseas, as friends and families of politicians and senior bureaucrats could afford to do, at the expense of ordinary people working to keep the country going who cannot afford overseas travel.

The nation has paid generals and admiral to make plans for dealing with imaginary military invasions and spent a massive amount on military toys for the boys and girls of the military, but it seems that there were not many people being paid to plan for the next pandemic, even though health experts were certain that one would come soon.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that many mistakes were made, but if there were people planning and brainstorming various scenarios, they would have been able to predict many of these problems and have been better prepared for dealing with them. Here are a few that seem obvious:

• Failure to purchase adequate backup supplies of ventilators given that most recent epidemics have affected respiration and they are much cheaper than most weapons.

• Capability for virus testing seems to have been underdone, so it took some time to get up to the needed capacity.

• Insufficient personal protection equipment may have been held in stock.

• Lack of capability to screen people at airports, checking temperatures, monitoring other symptoms, and identifying people coming from places with risk of exposure.

• Lack of capability to quarantine returning travellers with risks of being infected. Plenty of hotels had plummeting occupancy rates.

• Lack of capability to transport returning travellers to their homes without mixing them with people who had not travelled. They could have been put on different planes at different times.

• Lack of capability to trace contacts of infected people (existing call centres that are not needed during a lockdown could have been prepared and trained).

• Lack of capability and legislative authority for effective monitoring of people who are quarantined using cell phone technology.

• Lack of planning to quickly return international visitors, especially from hotspots like Queenstown. The government has spent millions attracting tourists to visit the country, but had no plans to return to their homes in a crisis.

NZ has 12,000 active military personnel. Having a few thousand people trained and equipped for pandemic protection would have been better value for money, even if they had nothing to do for a few years. Successive governments have grossly underfunded public health preventative activities.

Do not put your trust in bureaucrats,
nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help (Psalm 146:3).

It is better to take refuge in the Lord
than to trust in bureaurcats (Psalm 118:9).

Business Failure

The New Zealand government has enforced a shutdown on all non-essential businesses to stop the spread of covid19. This shutdown has been applied for four weeks, but there are suggestions that the health experts would like it to go much longer. This will make it really hard for many businesses to keep going.

Agriculture is considered to be an essential business, so that sector is still operating. That is good, because agriculture is a really important part of our economy.

New Zealand probably has too many retail and restaurant businesses, so although it will be painful for the staff and owners of those that cannot keep going, it will not be a problem for the economy as a whole. The same applies to many types of personal services.

The close of tourism sector will be painful for many people, but is inevitable given the long-term decline of international travel. This will be a hit on the economy.

Those aside, many businesses in New Zealand that produce things are currently closed down. If they are shut down for too long, many will not be able to keep going, because they cannot do their work from home. As well as being painful for the owners and staff of these businesses, this will be a serious long-term cost for the economy.

The problem is that most of our current government are academics or professional politicians. They have never been involved in running a business, apart from speculating in property, so they have no idea how difficult it is to start a business and keep it going. Few of their advisors have ever been responsible for a real business. Their salaries come in each fortnight, regardless of how many mistakes they may have made. Many people who are smarter than our leaders have tried to start a business, but have failed despite their best efforts. It is an incredibly hard task.

I hope that as soon as possible, the government will relax the constraints on these businesses that make an important contribution to our economy to allow them to start operating again. Business owners are smart, so they will work out clever ways of continuing some of their production, while keeping people with symptoms at home, and ensuring social separation of those who do come to work. If they can keep some of their production going, it might be the difference between survival and failure.

Corporate Socialism

Jim Quinn has some blunt comments about the repeated bailouts of the finance sector.

The 2008/2009 crisis, created by the Fed and their Wall Street banker proprietors, was used by the powers that be to abscond with trillions in national wealth, while further enslaving senior citizens in poverty and forcing the working middle class further into debt servitude. Bernanke, Yellen, Geithner and a myriad of other banker flunkies have been richly rewarded for their traitorous actions by their Wall Street brethren, with tens of millions in compensation for their duty and honor to the cabal.

The men who created the 2008/2009 global financial collapse through their mortgage fraud scheme, used fear and panic in the markets to force the feckless pathetic bought off congress apparatchiks to pass TARP and dozens of other ridiculous “bailout bankers” schemes to provide a façade of recovery. There was never a recovery. The unpayable debt was papered over with trillions more of unpayable debt, until something snapped in September 2019.

The taxpayer bailout of Wall Street should have been called No Banker Left Behind. The mind-boggling amount of debt issued over the last decade in order to rectify a problem created by issuing a previously mind-boggling amount of unpayable debt over the previous decade has become so large, the average person can’t comprehend the implications or consequences.

Corporate executives who recklessly loaded their companies with debt, while utilizing the proceeds to buy back their own stock, in order to boost their stock price and outrageous compensation packages, left their companies vulnerable to an entirely predictable downturn. After frittering trillions away on their overvalued stock, they now demand bailouts from the taxpayer, and their spineless captured congress lapdogs have obeyed their corporate masters. The 96 – 0 vote in the Senate is truly a disgusting example of the corporate fascist One Party system that reigns in the swamp. Corporate socialism is alive and well.

Only in a suicide cult, which our country has become, would the majority support and cheer for a corporate lobbyist written $2.2 trillion 873-page windfall to bankers, connected mega-corporations, and every special interest imaginable.

Living in Lockdown

We have now been locked down at home by government decree for the last week. At least three weeks to go. We can only go out for a walk close to our home.

Many people are finding it hard, but it does not seem as bad as the situation during the Christchurch earthquake in 2010. At that time, we could go out a little, but there were very places to go to. We mostly went to the milk tanker parked a couple of blocks away to get fresh water and occasionally to the supermarket for food. We were without electricity, running water and sewerage for 16 days. Water and sewerage were only restored when electricity came back on.

Landline telephones did not work, but we did have cellphones (not smartphones). However, we had difficulty charging our phones, so we had to use them sparingly.

The time did not drag back then, because everything was slow to do. Meals were cooked on the gas barbecue and on a small gas cooker. Boiling and cooling water to drink was an ongoing task. To have a shower, we had to boil water and put it in the solar shower that I had hung in the shower cabinet in our bathroom. So, most of the day was taken up with doing the essentials.

The difficulty in the current lockdown situation is that we have all our normal facilities, so cooking and washing does not take any longer. Many things that we usually do cannot be done, so everyone has lots of time on their hands.

I have a stack of library books, and a kindle with an endless supply of books, so I am not having any difficulty with filling in time. And being a bit of an introvert, the lack of social interaction is not a problem. I realise that it is much tougher for people with children to keep amused, although highspeed fibre internet makes life a little easier.

The people that I really feel sympathy are the people who are working in essential services dealing with the public. The ones that I respect most are the checkout operators (mostly female) who have close contact with dozens of unknown people each day, which puts them at considerable risk of infection. They are really poorly paid, but they have to take a lot of flak when the groceries people want are not available. I am sure many of them would prefer to be at home, but they have to go to work, because their families cannot survive without the income.

The other group that I respect are the nurses who are caring for the people who are infected with Covid19. Doctors often get the publicity, but they do not have to stay for long periods of time with the same infected patients. It is the nurses who provide the hour by hour care and monitoring for people who are highly infectious. They are well trained and have good equipment, but their work is still risky.

Last year, when the nurses were striking for better pay, commentators joked that they were not worth as much as engineers. The fact that the work of nurses involves “life risk” was discounted. Now that the “life risk” has arrived in force, I presume the engineers will not be lining up to care for infected people. They will be hoping they don't have to go in and fix incubators that need repairs.

Sheep and Goat Nations

In some Christian circles, there is considerable chatter about sheep nations and goat nations, based on Jesus parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31-46). Of course, most Christians assume that their nation is a sheep nation.

I can’t help wondering if the nation described below really is a sheep nation.

This nation has more intercessors and prophets than any nation in the world. They are crying out “Lord, Lord”, but...

The Christian secretary of state of this nation has imposed additional sanctions on Iran at a time when many people are sick and dying of Covid19 due to inadequate health equipment and health supplies. This nation blocked loans from the IMF to be used for purchasing health equipment.

Is Jesus saying, "I was a sick stranger (Greek word xenos), but your xenophopbic Christian leaders imposed sanctions that prevented me from getting health care".

The favourite ally of this nation shoots protesting youths across a boundary fence with sniper rifles aiming deliberately to smash their knee, ankle or shin, so they will be crippled for life.

Is Jesus saying, "I was a refugee and your friend crippled me by shooting me in the ankle, but you turned and looked the other way, and then supplied them with more weapons."

This nation supported its ally, the murderous Moslem dictator of Saudi Arabia to invade Yemen, which is one of the poorest nations in the world. This nation supplied the weapons used to bomb hospitals, schools, houses and bridges, killing tens of thousands of people. This nation has supported a blockade that has prevented food from getting to the hungry people of Yemen. Now when Covid19 has arrived, this nation has cut off promised funding for medical supplies.

Is Jesus saying "I was poor and sick, but you helped people to drop bombs on my school and home and steal my food."

This nation fought an 18-year war against Afghanistan because it provided hospitality for one of this nation’s proxy fighters who went rogue and turned against his sponsor. Now because it does not like the infighting between the warlords it made into a government, this nation is cutting off a billion dollars of aid.

This nation did not like the elected leader of Syria, so it stirred up a war and supplied weapons to groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. This nation was allowed to fight a civil war to put down, a succession movement, but the government of Syria is not. Now when the war is almost over, this nation has imposed sanctions on Syria to prevent its towns and cities from being rebuilt, because it still does not like its leader.

This nation did not like the leader of Libya, so it killed him and stirred up a civil war that has wrecked the nation that had the best health care and education in Africa.

This nation was not happy when the dictator it had assisted to power in Iraq got too big for his boots and turned ugly, so it invaded the nation and wrecked its economy, but it stills demands the right to decide who should rule the nation. This nation is imposing limits on imports of natural gas that the people need to survive, because it does not like the neighbouring nation that is supplying it.

Maybe Jesus is saying, "I was the slave of a dictator, but made me a slave of war, poverty and violence".

At a time when this nation is baling out big companies that wasted their profits on share buybacks that helped the rich, but left their company without financial reserves (corporate socialism), this nation is punishing the people of Venezuela for electing a socialist government to use oil money to bail out the poor rather than allow it to flow to rich oligarchs and their cronies.

Jesus might be saying, "I was trying to help the poor, but you tried to make poorer."

This nation has more prophets and intercessors than any nation in the world. They are claiming that God will quickly deliver their nation from Covid19 and restore its prosperity and economic domination of the world.

But maybe Jesus is saying, "You are calling out, “Lord, Lord", but I cannot hear you above the cries of the children suffering and dying from your nation’s wars, blockades and sanctions”.

Remember, nations will be judged on the basis of what they have done, not what other nations may have done. More is expected from those who have been given most.

If the behaviour described above is indicative of a sheep nation, August Caesar might be complaining with God, “I were not as bad as that, and I did not have the benefit of the cross and the Holy Spirit”.