There has been a lot of talk about this virus thingy. In our daily meanderings we come across opinions covering all scenarios, “It’s not as bad as the flu”, “It’s only old people who die”, “It’s ok, we only have a few cases”, “The Governments aren’t telling us the real totals”, “The Government is over-reacting”, “The Government isn’t doing enough”, “We should have closed the borders six weeks ago”, “We have the toughest border controls in the world”!
What the true state of the situation is will be revealed in time, and with perfect 20/20 hindsight we should be able look back and figure out who was right, and who was a deluded nincompoop. Maybe we will be laughing at ourselves for panic buying toilet paper, or maybe we will all be wishing we had, as we wipe our butts with dock leaves.
I’m no expert on these things, and invariably I would vote for the wrong response anyway because like most people, I am more inclined to think about how it will affect me rather than how it might affect others in different communities. But I can tell you this for free, our economy is taking a hiding from this virus.
I live down in the Queenstown area, and things are already starting to hit home, and in a pretty big way. What we are seeing right now is generally affecting tourism, and of course, with the Government decreeing that all visitors MUST self-quarantine, this will get worse very quickly.
While I think about it, why the wording ‘Self quarantine’? Is this different from ‘Self Isolation’? And if one ‘MUST’ self-quarantine, is it then no longer self-quarantine but just forced quarantine? How will this work in practice? I presume incoming travellers will be required to register somewhere, but then what? In Queenstown there are about five to ten cops on duty at any given time. Will they really be expected to start carrying out checks at hotels, backpackers etc to see if those registered are actually there? And make no mistake, there will be thousands per day even with reduced numbers. How will they check those who are self quarantining in their Maui campervan while they traipse around Central Otago?
In any case, will those tourism businesses still even be running at the end of all this?
I am hearing some pretty disturbing numbers coming from this sector. One of our local sky-diving companies has reportedly gone from receiving around 500 enquiries a day to receiving around 5.
Local hang-gliders and parapenters would normally be filling the skies over my house at this time of the year, but there are barely any flying at the moment. I have it on good authority that these companies are asking their foreign staff to move on so the locals can have what little work there is, but the foreigners won’t go as many of them can’t even get home to Europe.
An acquaintance who runs a small business looking after properties for tourism companies normally runs a team of three staff including himself. Last week he invoiced out a total of 26 hours. That’s a reduction in work load from three people to half a person.
One of our largest hotels in Queenstown is reportedly down over two million dollars in the last couple of months having been hit particularly hard with the loss of the Chinese New Year tourists.
But the Chinese tourists dry up at this time of the year and the conference season starts. How many conferences will be cancelled? Social distancing would suggest all of them should be.
People are starting to hurt. It is only a matter of time before the economics of all this really start to hit home. People are already losing their jobs. Quite how your Labour-led Government thinks that a rise in the minimum wage is going to help is beyond my simple brain’s ability to work out.
If you run a business, you simply must be looking at ways of surviving. It is not going to work itself out. Remember failing to plan is planning to fail.
If you are an employee, now is the time to be figuring out how to keep your job. Are you in a position to take a pay cut in order to help your company survive? Are you able to change your job description to help take on an extra load? Are you able to work out some way of showing your boss that you are so valuable to the company that you should be the very last person to be let go?
If you don’t, it might be you who is the first to go. Snowflake Millenials be warned, there will be no room for entitlement for the next year or so if you want to keep your job.
But there is some good news though. In my area at least, AirBnB properties are already being hit hard. So hard that quite a few of them are being put back on the long-term rental market.
So perhaps the Government’s lackadaisical attitude to your welfare might actually help solve the supposed housing crisis!
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